why do cheap tablets slow wifi down so much

Arronleeds

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i can use my laptop and various other things while gaming on my pc without a problem, but whenever my girlfriends dad uses his cheap crappy tablet to stream video to the tv using a hmdi adapter it cripples it so bad, i get 80 down and 20 up with a ping of 13ms but as soon as he touches that, it takes off over 60mbps down and makes my ping times fluctuate that much i cannot do anything.

the question is how can something with poor wifi cause things with better wifi slow down when theyre more restricted in terms of download speed.
 

Arronleeds

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im connected at 80 down 20 up, never thought of that, he has so many stupid apps on his tablet i dont even wanna know what malware he could have, its only when he uses his tablet the connection goes to crap.
 
If you both run wireless then it is likely the interference between the devices. If you get that type of drop and you are plugged into the router with ethernet that is more likely some issue with your ISP connection have errors when it is put under load.
 

Arronleeds

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my isp probably doesnt prioritise voip, my mums on a different network with a connection of 40 down 10 up and i never had problems like this. they dont route their traffic as well and probably dont utilise Qos properly either.
 

Obviously they don't do QoS that is something you would have to pay a lot extra for. How could they possibly know what traffic you think is important.

If it is a problem with the ISP it has nothing to do with their routing or QoS it would be that the connection the house is getting errors. Now that only applies if you are running your laptop wired if you are running wireless it is much more likely you have wireless interference between the device inside the house.

I
 

jacobian

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Guess what, whatever throughput you have available on your wireless band will always be shared by all wifi clients. In this sense, a wifi AP is behaving more like an ethernet hub rather than an ethernet switch (on a good switch, many port pairs can talk to either other at full speed without slowing down anyone else connected). My brother is a big gamer, and sometimes he complains about latency when I start torrenting or moving large files on the wlan between machines.

One interesting solution you can try is to get a dual band router. Have the tablet on one band (say 5GHz) and your gaming PC on the other band (say 2.4GHz). Normally, the device that's closest should use 5GHz since 5GHz signal dies out faster with distance. The cool thing about dual band routers is that each band is effectively a separate wlan. However, if you both connect to the internet though the same shared and slow pipe, then that may not solve your problems.
 

Arronleeds

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My router is dual band and you wanna know the crazy thing ? The 5ghz is actually better over distance than the 2.4ghz is but no matter what, when he uses his tablet to stream it doesn't matter what band I'm on, my latency is awful. I put it down to his tablet because if I download on any other device in the house my latency only increases by around 20-30ms. I can't use homeplugs either because the wiring in the house isn't that great and it increased my latency overall by about 10ms and that's a no for me :p