Hi everyone,
I moved into school recently and did my due diligence to make sure my room had an ethernet port. I showed up and my latency was excellent when on ethernet, but when I began watching a video, my latency went crazy. Confused, I ran a speedtest, and got only 7 Mbps down and up. Wirelessly on my phone, I can get 100/100 constantly. Confused, I wrote to the IT department and they then informed me (I wish I was joking, trust me) that the infrastructure in my residence hall is outdated and can only support 10 Mbps half duplex. I still almost can't believe this is a thing.
I'm trying to game and live stream, and as you can understand, I'm running into some extremely frustrating issues. When wired, I only have access to 7 Mbps of bandwidth at a time - streaming at 5,000kbps or so makes my ping spike around as I'm getting close to my cap, and as you can imagine, literally anything else loading on my PC ruins the entire experience. If I'm not streaming or doing anything, my wired latency is spot on, as the connection is excellent if you ignore the bandwidth cap - until you start watching a video. As I mentioned, wirelessly, my speeds are good - I tried Speedify after some research trying to combine the wired and wireless connections, but my situation seems to be as such where no combination of settings on their software made things any better when I loaded a video, and support wasn't helpful. As far as I can tell, the Windows 10 "bridge connections" feature is for local reasons and does nothing to help me.
So, feeling pretty defeated, I'm going to actually try to fall back on using wifi, and it might actually not be the end of the world. The access point is literally right outside my door, one thin wall away from me, and seems to handle things really well. However, new problem - my PC's wireless card is a crappy Realtek card that was tossed into my prebuilt compact PC that I'm still using from five years ago. This wasn't a problem before, but now I need to do something about it, because it doesn't offer me the throughput I need and it occasionally will drop lots of packets for no reason. My laptop in the same spot as my desktop tests about 5 times faster and doesn't have that issue. Getting a new PCI wireless adapter isn't possible as opening and working on this PC is... easier said than done - it needs to be USB.
Any advice on how to approach this or what wireless adapter to get would be appreciated. In my mind, I want a reliable wireless adapter that plugs in via USB 3.0 that will hopefully work well enough under these optimal wireless conditions (mere feet away from a Cisco AP) as this is kind of my only option (other than move, which I already tried believe it or not). Amazon (maybe even prime shipping) is preferable and price isn't necessarily a problem.
Thanks!
