Internet being really slow

[Garrison Marsh]

I've noticed this week our wifi has been awfully slow. I just did a speed test and I got 0.58mbps down and 2.25mbps up with 325ms latency so yea its pretty bad. I usually get like 20 down and 5-10 up. My PC says I have a strong connection to my wifi. I have also tried restarting the router and that didn't help. I wonder if this is my internet company's problem and I should call them. I don't know what to do but I can't play any multiplayer games right now so I'd like to figure it out.

[emosun]

whats the speed when directly connected to the modem

[Garrison Marsh]

1 minute ago, emosun said:

whats the speed when directly connected to the modem

good idea I should probably check that 

[Anghammarad]

Try using a cable first.

 

Your wifi connection may be strong, but you never know how many devices in the vincity are using the same frequencies you do on your wireless.

 

Everyone and everything uses Wifi today and usually wants it to work like a ethernet cable. But you always have to share frequencies with other devices that too use wifi and are in reach.

[Garrison Marsh]

Ok so i haven't tried wired connection yet but i just did a speed test on my phone that is connected to wifi and it got 24.8 down and 3.79 up with 107ms latency which still isn 't great but its a lot better.

[Septimus]

If you have a 5 GHz band available, test the bandwidth on that. 

[Garrison Marsh]

10 minutes ago, Anghammarad said:

Try using a cable first.

 

Your wifi connection may be strong, but you never know how many devices in the vincity are using the same frequencies you do on your wireless.

 

Everyone and everything uses Wifi today and usually wants it to work like a ethernet cable. But you always have to share frequencies with other devices that too use wifi and are in reach.

 

12 minutes ago, emosun said:

whats the speed when directly connected to the modem

So I don't have to router in the room that my pc is in so I can't do wired on it but I just did a test on my brother's laptop while it was in the same room as the router (not wired) and it got 56.1 down and 5.35 up with 32ms, then I tested it in my room and it still was very good... So i guess it's on my pc's side but what should I do about it?

[Garrison Marsh]

2 minutes ago, Septimus said:

If you have a 5 GHz band available, test the bandwidth on that. 

The wifi card a have doesn't let me connect to the 5g one

[dmuirhead]

107ms latency does seem high. 

 

You could try to do the following;

Press start

Open CMD

Type ipconfig and look for your default gateway IP address

Type "ping <insert gateway IP here>"

Then type ping 8.8.8.8 and check the difference.

 

If pinging your gateway gives you a high MS response time, it's like the problem is with your WLAN and you could look to try and change the wireless channels.  Applications like InSSIDer can help you to see what channels are being used in the local vicinity and look for a better channel to use. 

 

If pinging the gateway yields a low response time but pinging 8.8.8.8 is much higher, it may be worth speaking to your ISP.

 

Edit; Grammar.

[Septimus]

Just now, Garrison Marsh said:

The wifi card a have doesn't let me connect to the 5g one

Assuming your phone does allow you to connect to both frequencies, try testing the bandwidth on both bands and see if there's a difference. If there is, then I'd say its safe to assume that there is a decent amount of interference scrambling your signal. If there isn't a difference, then it may just be the wireless card you're using, in which case I would recomend a Gigabyte PCIe AC Wi-Fi adapter. 

[Garrison Marsh]

 

14 minutes ago, Septimus said:

Assuming your phone does allow you to connect to both frequencies, try testing the bandwidth on both bands and see if there's a difference. If there is, then I'd say its safe to assume that there is a decent amount of interference scrambling your signal. If there isn't a difference, then it may just be the wireless card you're using, in which case I would recomend a Gigabyte PCIe AC Wi-Fi adapter. 

Interesting so on the normal wifi i got 11.4 down and 1.31 up 247ms which is worse than before and on the 5g wifi i got 0.68 down and 1.25 up 190ms. Also just so you know I am on the other side of my house from the router, there are 2 walls between my pc and the router.

[dmuirhead]

Can you join your wireless network on your laptop and find this page in control panel?  Then observe the "Speed" stat - it will tell you if the connection to your WiFi is the bottle neck.

[Garrison Marsh]

21 minutes ago, dmuirhead said:

107ms latency does seem high. 

 

You could try to do the following;

Press start

Open CMD

Type ipconfig and look for your default gateway IP address

Type "ping <insert gateway IP here>"

Then type ping 8.8.8.8 and check the difference.

 

If pinging your gateway gives you a high MS response time, it's like the problem is with your WLAN and you could look to try and change the wireless channels.  Applications like InSSIDer can help you to see what channels are being used in the local vicinity and look for a better channel to use. 

 

If pinging the gateway yields a low response time but pinging 8.8.8.8 is much higher, it may be worth speaking to your ISP.

 

Edit; Grammar.

Yes pinging 8.8.8.8 is much higher.

[dmuirhead]

1 minute ago, Garrison Marsh said:

Yes pinging 8.8.8.8 is much higher.

What are the numbers? 

 

For reference, my network is the following-

 

Default gateway = ~3ms

8.8.8.8 = 16ms

 

That's on a decent WAP with several clients attached

[Garrison Marsh]

1 minute ago, dmuirhead said:

What are the numbers? 

 

For reference, my network is the following-

 

Default gateway = ~3ms

8.8.8.8 = 16ms

 

That's on a decent WAP with several clients attached

Default gateway 3ms

8.8.8.8 186ms

[dmuirhead]

6 minutes ago, Garrison Marsh said:

Default gateway 3ms

8.8.8.8 186ms

Ok, in CMD you could try and run-

 

tracert 8.8.8.8

 

If you've not used this tool before, it traces each "hop" from your PC to the destination.  It does 3 passes of each hop and gives you a time in MS for each one.

 

Run the tracert and watch it, you may find that one particular hop takes longer than others - it could be the problem.  Some hops will time out - that's pretty normal and usually means that the router doesn't response to ICMP messages (tracert)

 

Your PC will automatically look up each hop in DNS and give you something like local-xx-10-your-isp.net [123.123.123.123] If the slow one is your ISP, you can feed that back to them.

[Garrison Marsh]

3 minutes ago, dmuirhead said:

Ok, in CMD you could try and run-

 

tracert 8.8.8.8

 

If you've not used this tool before, it traces each "hop" from your PC to the destination.  It does 3 passes of each hop and gives you a time in MS for each one.

 

Run the tracert and watch it, you may find that one particular hop takes longer than others - it could be the problem.  Some hops will time out - that's pretty normal and usually means that the router doesn't response to ICMP messages (tracert)

 

Your PC will automatically look up each hop in DNS and give you something like local-xx-10-your-isp.net [123.123.123.123] If the slow one is your ISP, you can feed that back to them.

These numbers mean nothing to me lol if I send a picture of it is there anything I need to know to block out when i send it

[Garrison Marsh]

5 minutes ago, dmuirhead said:

Ok, in CMD you could try and run-

 

tracert 8.8.8.8

 

If you've not used this tool before, it traces each "hop" from your PC to the destination.  It does 3 passes of each hop and gives you a time in MS for each one.

 

Run the tracert and watch it, you may find that one particular hop takes longer than others - it could be the problem.  Some hops will time out - that's pretty normal and usually means that the router doesn't response to ICMP messages (tracert)

 

Your PC will automatically look up each hop in DNS and give you something like local-xx-10-your-isp.net [123.123.123.123] If the slow one is your ISP, you can feed that back to them.

Actually I think i get what you are saying. there was 1 slow one and it says COX on it which is my ISP but the next one is also COX and it was fast

[dmuirhead]

5 minutes ago, Garrison Marsh said:

Actually I think i get what you are saying. there was 1 slow one and it says COX on it which is my ISP but the next one is also COX and it was fast

Sounds like a problem with that node.  You should speak to your ISP and tell them that your getting slow response times from there.  It probably won't mean much to the first line guys but it might help the second line team look into it.

 

Edit; you'll see from mine all of the responses are pretty uniform - that's what you would expect to see.

[Garrison Marsh]

Just now, dmuirhead said:

Sounds like a problem with that node.  You should speak to your ISP and tell them that your getting slow response times from there.  It probably won't mean much to the first line guys but it might help the second line team look into it.

So why do you think my brother's laptop got such a good connection from my room but every other device doesn't?

 

[dmuirhead]

 

1 minute ago, Garrison Marsh said:

So why do you think my brother's laptop got such a good connection from my room but every other device doesn't?

 

I'd expect to see pretty similar performance with an issue like that - if you repeat those tests from his laptop do you get similar results?

[Garrison Marsh]

His is a macbook sooo idk is there a way to do it with that?

[Garrison Marsh]

Ok i got my mom's windows laptop and i did the test in the room with the router and it got uniform scores but when I brought it into my room it got scores similar to the ones on my PC where there was one that was really high and it is my ISP

6 minutes ago, dmuirhead said:

 

I'd expect to see pretty similar performance with an issue like that - if you repeat those tests from his laptop do you get similar results?

 

[dmuirhead]

In that case it sounds more like a WLAN issue.  You could look at statically assigning your WiFi to run on one of the non-overlapping 2.4ghz channels - 1, 6 or 11, then retest and see if you continue to see an issue.

 

I can't say exactly how you do that (lots of different routers), but you could start by typing your default gateway IP into your browser, and have a look in the wireless settings.

[Septimus]

1 hour ago, Garrison Marsh said:

 

Interesting so on the normal wifi i got 11.4 down and 1.31 up 247ms which is worse than before and on the 5g wifi i got 0.68 down and 1.25 up 190ms. Also just so you know I am on the other side of my house from the router, there are 2 walls between my pc and the router.

Get about 10 feet away from your router with no obstructions and try again on both networks, see if there is a difference. Right now it sounds like you're out of range for the 5GHz network and you may have too much interference on the 2.4GHz network - you're in a situation similar to me.