Interesting Internet Problem

[christopherh16]

So this is a strange problem I've been dealing with for a while. The place where I do most of my work and play has public wifi that is protected with a password. So there are two scenarios to my problem,when the speed says 300 mbps I experience lag when I'm watching streams or gaming every 3-5 minutes with most games completely kicking me out due to the internet dropping. When I'm watching streams, they just freeze for 10-20 seconds every 3-5 minutes. I keep an eye on my wifi icon at the bottom right during these times and it doesn't change. A couple months ago, the speed dropped to 135 mbps but I never had any problems when watching streams or playing games. Yesterday when I reinstalled my wifi drivers to fix another problem the speed went back up to 300 mbps. So my question is, have you guys even experienced anything like this and is there anything I can do to fix it?

 

[anotherdrew]

The speed you are referring to (300 mbps and 135 mbps) is the speed of your WiFi link (between you and the access point providing service). This speed is negotiated between the 2 devices based on signal strength and quality. It is very normal for this speed to go up and down as conditions change. The access point you connect to is in turn connected to a router that is in turn connected to the internet (probably via an ISP ... depends on the setup).

While your WiFi link is quite fast, the link from the router may not be as fast and as it is a public WiFi it may be shared by multiple people. The result is you see your connection speed up and slow down (even stop) as traffic patterns change.

Have I ever experienced this ... sure, in busy places like airports, ball park, etc.
Can you fix it ... No, as long as you are dependent on someone else's internet connection, you will be subject to the quality of service they provide.

 

[bill001g]

You can guess some things based on those numbers but you have to be very sure you get them exactly correct. Even small difference mean it is running a different encoding. You would try to find the numbers in a table like this one.
http://mcsindex.com/

Many times forcing the nic....not all can be set... to run a single data stream on 20mhz channels. This would drop your rate to 72.2 but because it is simpler you would likely get less errors.

This is pretty much a 300mbps with lots of errors is not as good as a slower data encoding but with few errors. This is especially true for games.