What to do about my poor unpredictable wifi?

[khorn06]

Hi, I am in need of assistance and some guidance on what I should do about my poor and unpredictable wireless signals. We have comcast by the way and SpeedTest.net has our speeds clocked in at about 22-27 mbps.

So to start here is the hardware I have:

• 
  Modem - about 3 years old - uBee DDM3513 Docsis 3.0
  Router - about 3 years old - Cisco-Linksys E4200 Dual-Band Wireless-N Router
  
  Desktop - custom built by myself - has the ASUS PCE-N15 11n Wireless LAN PCI-E Card
  The desktop is about 2 years old and full on junk slowing it down
  Laptop - custom made (SAGER) - has the Intel(R) Dual Band Wireless-AC 7260 Card
  The laptop is about a year old and runs almost like new
  
  Phone - samsung galaxy s6 edge - brand new

The Problem I have:

• 
  Both me and my brothers enjoy playing online, network intensives PC games, we go through quite a bit of bandwidth everyday. One of the problems is that we can not play any games on the desktop unless everyone else is off the internet. Just one person will drastically slow down everything in the games
  
  When playing on my laptop I have this problem but it is not nearly as bad. I can play with very little lag on the same game. Me and one of my other brother were just in the same game actually and he disconnected about 3-4 times while I only got a couple small spikes in lag
  
  My phone, playing summoners war, seems to be very buggy when connected to the wifi in our home only on certain occasions, mostly at night time though. Which brings up the other issue I noticed. During night when everyone is asleep our wifi also seems to go to sleep. Night is when I experience the second most amount of lag

I can only think of two known causes to the sluggish network we have. One the desktop has way too much junk on it slowing everything down, I know that for sure. The second is the throughout the day we have several people over our house working out (we have a full gym in our back yard that would put most gyms to shame), and of course offer wifi out there but under a different SSID? the broadcasted name is different.

Another thing to bring up is we have the router and modem and every other home electronic basically hot boxed in one of our cabinets, the place is like a sauna in there, would this cause issues, especially because the modem and router are old?

Would we need a new router or a new modem that is better suited to handling A LOT of traffic?

Is there maybe another solution or potential cause that I am missing?

Thank You

 

[BadAsAl]

I don't know if your router or modem are the issue. They both have decent specs and are capable of fast connections.

What is your measured upload speed?
When you connect your laptop directly to router via LAN cable, what kind of speeds do you get?

Heat could be contributing, is there anyway to temporarily move the router and modem out of the hot box to see if that improves the situation?

Have you power cycled both the router and modem recently? Make sure when you do this you disconnect the coax to the modem as well as the power.

 

[bill001g]

Just because you run different ssid does not mean the wireless does not conflict. You need to ensure the channels do not overlap and that is increasingly difficult most 802.11ac routers use 2/3 of the 2.4g band and 1/2 the 5g bandwidth. Some of the so called triband ones use all the 5g bandwidth. This means if you have 2 wireless router/ap you have to work at it to not overlap. This of course assume you have no neighbors who also have multiple routers.

You can do little to fix this. Wireless causes random delays and retransmission of data when there are multiple devices trying to use wireless....including ones your neighbors have. Games are extremely susceptible to these delays which is why it is recommended you never run games on wireless. This is a fundamental conflict with how games work and how wireless is designed to share bandwidth. It really doesn't matter a lot what routers you get they all have the same issues when you have multiple devices competing for bandwidth.

You would have to spend a lot of time with the wireless trying to find free bandwidth. You would want to force the router to only use 20mhz channels which slows the device down but greatly increases your chance to find radio bandwidth that is not used.

Still everyone else in the neighborhood is doing the same thing so it is a constant battle to see who get the radio bandwidth. If you have a neighbor with strong signals who is actively using one of the new tri band routers with a number of active devices that ones person can easily disrupt everyone.

Your only real option when wireless works poorly is not to use it. For desktop machines you are best off looking at ethernet cable if you can get it or maybe something like powerline networks.

 

[khorn06]

Thank you for the answers and sorry for the late reply, just got back from vacation.

For desktop machines you are best off looking at ethernet cable if you can get it or maybe something like powerline networks.

I have never heard of power line networks before. I did a quick google and I see that its supposed to be a cheap and efficient way to connect multiple computers in a house. Does that mean all the computers would be connected to the router through an ethernet cable and would that be a good choice for laptops?

 

[khorn06]

Sorry for the late reply

What is your measured upload speed?
When you connect your laptop directly to router via LAN cable, what kind of speeds do you get?

my upload speeds were about 5-6 mbps and connecting with a LAN cable did improve my speeds and responsiveness but it is not the ideal way to connect to the internet for me unfortunately

Heat could be contributing, is there anyway to temporarily move the router and modem out of the hot box to see if that improves the situation?

unfortunately no there is no other way to move the modem/router unless we have like a 50+ ft ethernet cable. There is only 1 working jack in our house at the moment

Have you power cycled both the router and modem recently? Make sure when you do this you disconnect the coax to the modem as well as the power.

I have tried doing that and I did do it that way as well, I did it multiple times.

 

[bill001g]

If you have the option to use ethernet cable it is always better than any other option. Most laptops have ethenet ports but some that are more like tablets unfortunately do not but you could use USB-ethernet adapters if you really wanted ethernet.

Power line is not a magic fix it too has is issues since it transmit radio type signal over wires. 2 units normally work very well, you start adding 3 or more and you will get some degradation in the speed for each you add so you do not want to use more than the minimum. You can plug a wireless AP/router into them to get wireless at the remote location or you can plug a small switch in and plug multiple machines in via ethernet.