[SOLVED] Internet on new laptop much worse than old pc despite being newer with wifi 6

[zengaryt]

I recently bought a new laptop replacing the one I was using before this which I had for ages (bought in 2016). This laptop is way faster and performs so much better but the wifi is super inconsistent and is always disconnecting every couple seconds and is just generally unstable. When I go downstairs closer to my router, the wifi is fine and fast but the second I go upstairs it gets super slow and disconnects every couple minutes.

My new laptop says it supports wifi 6 and I went into the properties and I see the options for 802.11ax which I think is wifi 6, I think it should be faster than my old laptop's wifi but it's so much worse. I don't know what the issue is and I'd really appreciate any help

in device manager the name of my wifi adapter is: Intel(R) Wi-fi 6 AX200 160MHz

 

[bill001g]

Does your router support wifi6 if not then the new machine is dropping back to 802.11ac.

This seems to be a common complaint with wifi6 when the signal is not very strong. Wifi6 is trying to use a very dense data encoding called qam1024. Many times it gets too many errors but it should drop back to the same encoding used by 802.11ac. The other is wifi6 uses 160mhz radio channels. This increases the amount of interference you can get. In theory wifi 6 has better methods to avoid this but it seems to not help much in real life installs.

There are all kinds of complex restrictions related to weather radar avoidance when you use 160mhz channels. If your router supports try to force it to 80mhz channels.

Now if the router is only 802.11ac you would think the card would work similar to your old card since it is all 802.11ac.

 

[zengaryt]

Does your router support wifi6 if not then the new machine is dropping back to 802.11ac.

This seems to be a common complaint with wifi6 when the signal is not very strong. Wifi6 is trying to use a very dense data encoding called qam1024. Many times it gets too many errors but it should drop back to the same encoding used by 802.11ac. The other is wifi6 uses 160mhz radio channels. This increases the amount of interference you can get. In theory wifi 6 has better methods to avoid this but it seems to not help much in real life installs.

There are all kinds of complex restrictions related to weather radar avoidance when you use 160mhz channels. If your router supports try to force it to 80mhz channels.

Now if the router is only 802.11ac you would think the card would work similar to your old card since it is all 802.11ac.

I'm not too sure if my router supports wifi 6, it might not since we got it pretty long ago. if it doesn't what should I do?

 

[bill001g]

Not sure the wifi6 card is suppose to be backward compatible. Now in some cases it is slower. If your old card for example had 3 antenna it would be faster than the new wifi6 because most only have 2 antenna.

All I can think of is to ensure you have the newest drivers, wifi6 is still somewhat new and has some bugs. Still you have one of the most common intel based cards which has been fairly stable.

 

[gggplaya]

I suspect your old laptop was 2.4ghz and your new one supports 2.4ghz and 5ghz and you are on the limit of 5ghz's range. You might want to separate the frequencies on your router and connect only to 2.4ghz.

Do you know what model router you're using? Is it provided by the ISP?

 

[zengaryt]

I suspect your old laptop was 2.4ghz and your new one supports 2.4ghz and 5ghz and you are on the limit of 5ghz's range. You might want to separate the frequencies on your router and connect only to 2.4ghz.

Do you know what model router you're using? Is it provided by the ISP?

My router was provided by my ISP, if i wanted to use 2.4ghz like my old laptop how would I do that?

 

[gggplaya]

Follow this tutorial:
https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials...ed-band-wireless-network-adapter-windows.html

This is only a preference, not guarunteed to connect at 2.4ghz. It's better to separate the 5ghz into it's own SSID. We would need to know the make and model of your router to give you better advice on how to change those settings.