Why is my network doing this?

[Lusky]

Hi all,

Hoping you can help me here with an issue which is driving me mad.

 

My house has been wired to have Cat 5e which is connected to an unmanaged switch. Plugging into one of the network points is a Draytek router.

 

Also plugging into the network is an old Draytek AP700 access point which I can connect to, to access internet etc on my laptop and iPhone.

 

The issue I am having is that when my iPhone is connected to the network and I start to watch a video on, say, Facebook, it starts to play for a few seconds and then buffers and plays a bit more etc and then stops; the same happens when I am looking through photos on Facebook. Youtube is the same too.

 

I have been playing around with my router and set up bandwidth management according to IP address but this did not work either.

 

Yesterday, I purchased an Ubiquiti AP and still the problem exists.

 

It is true that I am doing a large file upload which has been going on for a couple of weeks now but this problem has been ongoing for ages now and it is so frustrating!!

 

Any thoughts would be very much appreciated.

[Aderalia]

Unmanaged Switches can be pretty picky in how they deal with bandwidth if multiple clients use them at the same time.

 

Also some ISP really struggle with multiple simultaneous connections to different servers (mostly coax based ones from my experience).

 

Since your Access Point doesn't seem to be the problem it would be interesting if a wired machine has the same issues and if they are still present if you connect directly to your Router.

[Lusky]

1 hour ago, Aderalia said:

Unmanaged Switches can be pretty picky in how they deal with bandwidth if multiple clients use them at the same time.

 

Also some ISP really struggle with multiple simultaneous connections to different servers (mostly coax based ones from my experience).

 

Since your Access Point doesn't seem to be the problem it would be interesting if a wired machine has the same issues and if they are still present if you connect directly to your Router.

I have a bit of an update and that when I connect my laptop to the wifi, it seems to work okay which indicates there might be an issue with the iPhone connection. If I turn off the wifi on my phone and use 4G, the issue goes away.

[Falcon1986]

6 hours ago, Lusky said:

I have a bit of an update and that when I connect my laptop to the wifi, it seems to work okay which indicates there might be an issue with the iPhone connection. If I turn off the wifi on my phone and use 4G, the issue goes away.

Different devices have different ways that they can deal with wireless signals. If your wireless router allows for MU-MIMO then it can communicate with more devices simultaneously rather than having to wait for one before starting the other. In the same vein, some client devices don't have multiple antennae to support more simultaneous data streams from wireless access points, so they will suffer when the AP gets busy with other clients.

 

11 hours ago, Lusky said:

It is true that I am doing a large file upload which has been going on for a couple of weeks now but this problem has been ongoing for ages now and it is so frustrating!!

I wouldn't completely rule this out as being a cause of your connection issues. If your upload is being saturated, so will your download at some point because data has to be requested/sent before it can be received/downloaded.