[SOLVED] WiFi connection consistently ping spiking every few seconds ?

[turtleduck717]

I have recently swapped to WIFI since my apartment that I moved to has terrible powerline accessibility,
(powerline light is red with slow connections and sometimes connection drops entirely almost 24/7) works perfectly with the red light about 40-50% of the time

What I got and where I got it from:
I went to my local best buy for a wireless USB adapter and found an Asus USB-AC53. I looked at what it offered and saw it had the standard features.
Plugging it into my Pc and installing the driver from the cd, I started getting ping spikes most commonly when gaming but also when browsing (less noticeable) with games' pings sometimes jumping to 350-900 (depending on game but mostly League of legends and TFT)

Troubleshooting steps I've tried:

• changing port
• restarting router
• getting Xfinity support to reset the wireless service, (in case it was on their side)
• unplugging the router and reconnecting after 20 seconds

On the software side I've done almost every troubleshooting step I've seen that made sense to me except ones who tamper with the registry since I have some data here I would like to back up and not too confident that I wouldn't make a mistake without precise steps

 

[bill001g]

Which ac53 did you buy. They make 2 one has the name "nano" on the end. The one with the long USB cable and a mounting stand will work much better for desktops. If you purchased the nano on get a USB cable and move it away from the computer

You can search for the process to turn off what is called "autoconfig" on your wifi. Microsoft will search for other networks to connect to but to do this the radio must scan which will cause the ping spike. They seem to have patched this in later versions so it is not so bad.
A lot of the information you find about autoconfig is old. Unfortunately turning it off can make it not reconnect when you disconnect. It is not real hard but better if you search for it and find sites that explain the process in detail.

Now this may not solve the issue. It could purely be that you are using wifi to play games. Games unlike almost any other traffic uses the delay between packets to sync the client and the server. Wifi is pretty much the only network technology that tries to do data retransmission to recover damaged data.
This retransmission takes time and causes the spikes. It is one of those fundamental design things that are make this the worst combination you can get. This is why you see it recommended that you never play games on wifi.

You can't really fix the problem with wifi because it is almost always interference from outside your house.

You are kinda stuck it appears. Powerline tends to work much better than wifi for games but as you found some houses it just does not work in due to the electrical wires. You can only try other outlets and hope it is different.
Note there is a large difference between the older generation of powerline units and the newer ones with numbers like 1000 and 2000. Unfortunately these too can not work in some houses so be sure to buy from some place that has a good return policy if you look to buy new ones.

The only other option would be MoCA. You need coax cable in both rooms. These devices are the only technology that get true gigabit speeds other than ethernet. They tend to be almost immune to interference.
Problem is many people do not have the coax cable and you might as well just install actual ethernet if you are going to put in new cables.

 

[turtleduck717]

I have the Nano adapter. Another question I have is would the wifi speeds be affected if the Nano adapter was plugged into USB 2.0 since my 3.0 wires had to be unplugged for my graphics card (large card in a mid sized case).

As for coax cable, I'm going to be going to college this summer and that wouldn't be an ideal solution for only 4 months or so with the entire installation process.

I've moved the powerline adapters through different rooms and everything and everywhere the powerline is red and subpar connections

As for distance, I'd say the router is roughly 15 yards or so (sorry for awkward measurement, play football so I know that best) with no walls in between and the ping spikes happens regardless of any other appliances or devices active in the house.

I tried disabling auto config before but when I try it keeps saying There is no such wireless interface on the system

P.S. (I may not have said this clearly before so that's on me) The spikes occur regardless of whether I'm playing a game or not but it happens significantly more frequently when I'm gaming.
Ex. Chrome takes an extra 3-6 seconds to open a website, Games experience ping spikes, etc
I confirmed this by pinging google.com from CMD and while sometimes it would say 20ms 0% packet loss (4 pings), other times it would say 2000ms 25% packet loss (4 pings)

 

[bill001g]

Those nano devices are designed where portability is more important that performance.

They tend to have very small antenna and many times the radio chips do not operate at full power to reduce battery drain.

Making these even worse is when you stick that tiny device near the massive metal case if a desktop. It already has issues and the metal case blocks huge amounts signals.

First thing to try is a USB extension cable. Maybe you can find a place that gets a better signals. Does not actually take moving it very far from the case to help a lot.

After that you are extremely limited in what you can try. It is the standard change the radio channel, try the other radio 2.4 or 5, change the channel width to 20mhz which will cut the speed but generally increase the stability. Most these changes you need to do on the router not the end device.

 

[bill001g]

So I see asus changed some stuff. If you search for ac-53 you get pictures of a product with a USB cable but on their site they only have the nano device. They may have discontinued the other one.

In general if you look for a device that comes with a cable and a external mount it generally means it is designed for desktops.

Things like the transmit power are very hard to find and the amount allowed is different for different countries. You will see different rating for the fcc and the EU and some other ones. What is strange in some ways is asus actually has the transmit power for your particular device listed.
I get confused as to what the maximum values are allowed. I know routers tend to transmit near the maximum of 30db. That device is close to 20db which I think it the max in the EU ,but I forget these details. 20db is actually 1/10 the transmit power of 30db just because of how measuring output power in db works.

This means using a USB cable might be all you need to do.

Pretty much all the products I used to know all the numbers on are discontinued. But in general if it is designed for a desktop it is much more likely to be higher power.

The last time I did this I actually gave up and used a wifi bridge that you connect to the pc via ethernet rather than USB.

 

[turtleduck717]

So, I've got the USB extender, and tried it out.

While it was a great improvement to my previous conditions, it didn't actually fix any of my problems. I got it from my local Walmart and it cost around 6$ which is the average price I saw online. I'm actually able to use the internet now without it taking 2 minutes to open a YouTube video but the ping connection still spikes heavily in games (with spikes ranging from 100ms to 350ms which is still unplayable with how often they occur). Initially I thought the problem was location so I moved the dongle around for a suitable spot and couldn't find one. So my next choice was to move it as close to the router as possible so I extended the chord and the problem still persists. I have no idea what to do at this point.

 

[bill001g]

Sounds like you have a strong source of interference try other channels maybe you get lucky

 

[gggplaya]

Those NANO adapters, you basically need to be in the same room as the router for it to work reliably. 15 yards might even be a little far.

For the most reliable wifi, I prefer to do what bill suggested and use a wifi bridge. This involves using a router(maybe you have an old one laying around, or a friend or family might have one sitting in a closet or something) and setting it to be used as a wifi bridge. The router, with it's superior radio circuitry and antennae would connect to your main wifi and bridge that to the ethernet ports. You can then connect your PC to ethernet.

But ultimately since you're moving to a dorm or apartment for college, I would invest in a pcie wifi card for your desktop: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07NFMSGGR

 

[turtleduck717]

I believe you now but the only driving point for me to buy it was the way it described that it was able to handle gaming, which i assume means at least a mediocre connection (maybe a spike every few minutes or10 min or so) but not every 10 seconds should there be a ping spike even on the lowest product quality. Thank you for your help, and I will note these tips when searching for a solution in the future.

 

[bill001g]

The person that wrote that was a clueless marketing guy or maybe a engineer that thinks online gaming is playing candy crush. There is no good wifi for online gaming.

The fundamentals of how wifi does error correction and online games using the latency between packets to sync the client and server timing is the worst combination possible. Pretty much any other form of network will drop data rather than delay it and there is less damaged data to begin with on other technology.
Games actually tolerate small amounts of data loss better than random latency between packets. Of course if it gets too large that is a issue and wifi will always have more damaged data because of all the sources of interference.