Jump to content

Internet Speed Drops to 0 After Spiking

Jakelq

If this belongs elsewhere please assist, I've searched the existing threads with "internet speed slows to 0" and saw no solution yet.

 

My buddy got a used computer recently with decent specs, I'm unsure of them exactly and he is not super tech savvy at least on the hardware side so getting exact hardware names is difficult. He's also 1000 miles away from me so seeing it myself is difficult.

 

The problem is his internet speed (down and up) will spike to something like 250 megabit then drop to 0 over the next few seconds and any download/upload will freeze. Steam downloads work fine, it doesn't seem to spike. Internet/multiplayer games work fine, but youtube videos buffer and freeze after 5-10 seconds. Internet downloads (like a pdf or zip) will usually freeze, with both edge and chrome. Different speed tests show different results, speedtest by ookla will show 850 megabit down, 150 up. The speed test by google (I think?) shows the 850 initially but then drops to ~0 across 5-10 seconds. He recently got a new router to try and fix this and it didn't change anything.

 

Sounds like a simple solution, maybe cable is damaged, maybe ISP is throttling, maybe server connection is bad, but it's probably none of these. He has his old system still running on the same router, and I've asked him to try changing the ethernet cables and router ports. Everything works on his old PC, full speed, the speed tests don't throttle, youtube doesn't buffer, I haven't really seen a spike in download but it may be it just goes up and never falls. So this isolates it to the system. This is the same with both ethernet and wifi, but since he has separate devices for wifi and for ethernet I'm focusing on ethernet right now. I do know after screensharing and looking around, his ethernet device is Intel Ethernet Controller (3) I225-V and we unsuccessfully tried to update drivers and a reinstall didn't change anything. He is running windows 11 and can't install the windows updates because the network drops to 0 and it fails. I'm at a loss for the next troubleshooting step and need advice on how to continue here.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Link to post
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now

×