[SOLVED] (Weird problem) WiFi slower on new top laptop than other devices including 5yr old laptop

[slowestwifi13532423]

I've bought a new top of the line laptop that's spec'd out from DELL and have had it for 2 weeks. The last week it has had unusual WiFi connectivity issues.

Doing speed tests, I'm getting 1-8 Megabits/sec down and 5 up in my room on my new Dell laptop which is a good distance from my router, through a couple thick walls. However my cheap old laptop that couldn't even connect to 5 GHz WiFi is getting speeds of 20-40Megabits/second from my 100 down/10 up provided internet in the same position as my new laptop. Ontop of that, my 4 year old phone is getting similar, 40-50 Megabits/second speeds in my room, which again is much higher than my new laptop that was released this year.

I have updated all my drivers, uninstalled and reinstalled my network adaptor through device manager and reinstalled through the intel website with no difference to my speeds. I've reset my router a few times as well with no results.

Funnily, the connection seemed fine last week when it had good speeds and averaged around 20-30 Megabits/second but for some reason, it suddenly stopped getting those speeds again. My only answers I can think of is : wifi antenna loose or incorrect config of my wifi that somehow affected my speeds without me changing anything.

Now there's a weird part. If I go close to my router, I can get 100 up and 10 down. If i connect to my wifi repeater on the 5ghz band, I can get 40-50Megabits per second. The problem here is that when I'm gaming in my room, if I connect to the WiFi repeater I do get good speeds but random ping spikes every few seconds which is not playable. If i put my laptop in the corner of my room, closest to the wall that is between the router and my laptop, I can connect to the 5ghz band and get 60 up and 8 down. If I move my laptop 2 metres to the middle of my room, on a desk where i game and with a wardrobe between my desk and wall closest to router, I get the 5 mbps speed. My 5 yr old laptop in the same position gets 40Mbps.

The network adaptor I have is the intel(r) wifi 6 ax201 160mhz. My best guess is that this model has really bad connectivity.

Any fixes?

 

[Ralston18]

Verify that the laptop's wired network adapter is disabled.

5 GHz - what channel?

Try using 2.4 GHz and repeat the above tests.

Are you in a location where there are likely to be multiple wireless networks?

You can easily check that by opening Powershell on your laptop.

Run the command:

netsh wlan show networks

Also, run "ipconfig /all" and post the results.

 

[PeterCard]

I bought a HP Spectre X360 14 with AX201 wifi and from the beginning have been experiencing slow/unpredictable download and upload speeds (5Mbps d/l and 1 Mbps u/l).
I tried adjusting the settings in device manager which at first seemed to make a difference, but eventually to no avail.
After opening the machine and inspecting the AX201 device I found a few problems.
the AX201 is a very compact device and you have to look very carefully. mine had a disconnected antenna cable, a cable ferrule touching the metal shield on the chip, etc. Interestingly I tried to isolate the metal parts by using s small piece of insulation tape but that made the speeds worse.
After re-routing the cable and aligning an existing insulation pad that sticks to the top of the device it now works fine (54Mbps u/l and 18.6 Mbps d/l).