[SOLVED] Wifi gets painfully slow during certain times of the day but LAN is rock solid at 100megs nearly all day.

[rosswilli27]

Hello, my name is Ross, and I am having a peculiar issue with my home network...

I moved into a new house a couple months ago and got a new ISP. I noticed at certain times of the day all wifi devices struggle with the internet while I have nearly perfect internet on my PC and Playstation which are both on LAN. The time of day is usually later in the day, I guess you would say peak usage time.

The issue I have is that the LAN speeds never change, so the data is coming into the modem, then to the router where for some reason the router has issues outputting to wifi but no issues with LAN. This is a brand new router, and I have tried my older model which has the same issues. So I find it hard to believe the router is the culprit. We don't have any new devices join and eat wifi bandwidth at peak times of the day, maybe 1 or 2 devices here or there. I cant come up with a reason to explain this. Even if the device is sitting on top of the router the speeds don't improve during this slow period. Obviously not interference that magically shows up during the evening.

Is it possible that the ISP is to blame here? They have a product which is basically a wifi extender to rent for $10 a month. Can they some how make, intentionally or not, my wifi specifically crappy?

 

[Ralston18]

Configuration problem perhaps....

ISP? Make and model modem? Make and model Router? And is there also a wifi extender involved? If so, make and model?

Check the router wifi configuration. May not be configured to match your wireless device configurations?

What frequency and channels are you using? Could be interference via a neighbor's wireless network. May work okay until some threshhold value and performance suffers.

Start looking around when the performance drops - especially if the slowness is fairly consistent with respect to times.

Router's logs (if available and enabled) may be capturing some error or traffic problem.

 

[bill001g]

If it is dual band try to go to 5g if that is a option. It may or may not work better. When it is time of day related it generally is other people causing the problem. If it was all your device then the ISP could have a overload but since the lan devices are fine it is much more likely the neighbors got home from work and fired up something like netflix.

 

[rosswilli27]

Configuration problem perhaps....

ISP? Make and model modem? Make and model Router? And is there also a wifi extender involved? If so, make and model?

Check the router wifi configuration. May not be configured to match your wireless device configurations?

What frequency and channels are you using? Could be interference via a neighbor's wireless network. May work okay until some threshhold value and performance suffers.

Start looking around when the performance drops - especially if the slowness is fairly consistent with respect to times.

Router's logs (if available and enabled) may be capturing some error or traffic problem.

• 
  -ISP is WOW!
  -MODEM is TP-Link DOCSIS 3.0.
  -ROUTER is NETGEAR AC1200 Dual Band. I have some device on 2.4ghz and others on 5ghz. Each band seems to be affected the same.
  -There is no Wifi extender... I was suggesting(if possible) they were simulating poor service to promote this product.
  -I don't see anything on the configuration of the router that would affect specific times of day.
  -I will enable logging on my router.

 

[rosswilli27]

If it is dual band try to go to 5g if that is a option. It may or may not work better. When it is time of day related it generally is other people causing the problem. If it was all your device then the ISP could have a overload but since the lan devices are fine it is much more likely the neighbors got home from work and fired up something like netflix.

Yea my first instinct was interference but our neighbors are pretty far away consisdering(50-75 yards). Also most of the devices are on 5ghz

 

[bill001g]

You could try to see if there was a firmware upgrade but I can't see any bug that would be time of day related.

With wifi you have very little you can do. Pretty much your only options are to try other channels but it tends to be almost impossible to find bandwidth that is not shared. On 2.4g most device use 40mhz out of 60mhz. This means no 2 router can coexist without overlap. You pretty much have the choice of using channels 1-7 or channels 4-11. On the 5g when you run 802.11ac you use 80mhz of bandwidth. There are only 2 blocks in the 5gig band that have 4 contiguous channels.