Frustrating Wifi Problems

GamerGarOnfroy1 · September 11, 2021

Hey, my family owns a Google Wifi Mesh system. It has been working somewhat good for me. I live on the opposite side of the house than the router but my house isn't really that big, just has thick concrete walls. One day I had enough and I ran a Cat5 cable up to my room, plugged it in and I did two Wifi tests. Ookla and the Google one. They both showed that I was getting over 750mb per second both up and down on my computer! This was great as it was many many times faster than before.

Now the problem is that my solution for connecting the cables was to just run the cable out the windows. This is temporary as we are going to get a company to come and drill the holes and make it look better, but thats besides the point. My family and I went of a short vacation for like 5 days and we had to unplug the cable in order to lock the window. Window singular because I didn't have to mess with mine because I'm on the top floor, so only by the router we had to lock. We disconnected the router side if that matters but not my computer side.

When I got back, my speeds were more than cut in half and now (only) get around 98 up and down. There isn't anyone on the network at the moment so this is sort of weird. What make me frustrated is that things like this has happened before. Over time I fucking swear the wifi almost "degrades". It happened with Xfinity and now its happening with USI. I don't think it is the ISP but more the router.

Anyways I appreciate your time in reading this and any suggestions are appreciated. Cheers

Chronified · September 11, 2021

Could be 2 things, 1 most likely you're now testing the connection speed during peak times and aren't getting your promised speeds, this is common in many areas.

You live in Minneapolis, it's 4PM on a Saturday, everyone is home streaming on the internet. Search "internet peak time" for more info. TL;DR it means your neigbourhoods internet traffic is too congested to reach your promised speeds. Each node on the street only receives 10/20/50Gbit from the ISP and that gets split up to the homes surrounding, if everyone is home using the internet then you won't get your promised speed. Even on Fibe.

2, less likely, 98Mbps sounds like the 2 are only handshaking at 10/100 .

Go to your network connections (type "network connections" in the start menu) double click the ethernet and make sure the speed is at 1.0Gbps, if it says 100Mbps that means there's something wrong with the cable, it's too far, signal is getting degraded or something else got messed up.

If it's showing a 1.0Gbps signal but you're still testing around 98Mbps, wait until past midnight and try the test again, you might just have bad peak-times in your area. If it becomes a regular issue you can reach out to your ISP to have your node upgraded to the next tier, I had to bug Bell Canada to upgrade my apt buildings node from 10Gbit to 50Gbit after they released Fibe because I was getting about the same speeds as you. 65 units shouldn't be sharing 10Gbit when they offer 2.5Gbit to the customer lol

Bombastinator · September 11, 2021

I don’t know if this lower speed applies to both wired and wireless or to wireless only. When you did the tests did you do them with the windows open which are now shut? Old double frame wood windows can have massive iron counterweights in the sashes which move up and down as the window is opened and shut. Might mean nothing or something. Radio signal is a fickle thing and can be blocked or reflected my seemingly minor or invisible things. It could be a change in your house, or a change made by your provider. It’s hard to tell from here. Something changed. The question is what? If the speeds on both the wireless and the wired are down to 98 it could be some change the provider made, perhaps some change the provider made which shouldn’t affect your speed but does to to equipment somewhere. If the wired speed remains the same but the wireless speed goes down it could be a morphological change in the environment or a change made by the provider that somehow effects the wireless but not the wifi. If it’s a provider change it will be happening likely to other people besides yourself.