Unexplained WiFi download rate slowdown

[lillard]

A WiFi mystery. First, the equipment involved: an HP 15-ay039wm notebook PC running Intel802.11ac Intel Dual Band Wireless AC3165, a Linksys EA7500 router, all operating on 5GHz WiFi. Distance between the router and the HP notebook is about 15 feet. HP notebook runs on Windows 10 64 bit. WiFi driver is up to date.

Issue: as measured by Speedtest.net, WiFi download speed is usually around 180 megs. However, sometimes, without warning or indication of trouble, the download speed as shown by Speedtest.net will decrease to 50 megs download. Internet transfers are not interrupted. Download speeds on the HP notebook return to normal after uninstalling and reinstalling the Intel Dual Band Wireless AC3165, Of course, there's no indication of what causes the issues, and no hint of whether the problem lies with the Speednet.net test or not. Resetting the Linksys router makes no difference.

 

[birne]

does the problem only occur on your laptop?
also try a different spedtest just to make sure

 

[atljsf]

the speed fluctuations remember that are not only determined by your side of the network, if the internet server offering the file downloaded is busy, the speed will fluctuate

does the local transfer speed changes when this happens?

how many networks are in the area where you live, if the networks are more than 20, surely the channels are a bit saturated, use wifi analyzer on your smartphone to ee how the wifi networks are in your area, this is a ac connection but some issues with channels will still affect speeds

 

[lillard]

The problem may have been an incorrect driver. I was using a driver through the Intel driver update utility, and the issue went away when I used a driver supplied by HP. Perhaps the "make sure drivers are updated" advice isn't always the best.