Poor Wi-Fi, now 100% packet loss

[Jay123]

So I've just moved into a new house in which I can no longer have an Ethernet cable ran to my computer. However the router is only in the room directly below my PC so I didn't think there would be too much of an issue. A friend gave me what seems to be a decent quality USB adapter but my connection varies so much.

 

Sometimes I'm getting 999+ ping in all games, sometimes it's fine (30-80). There's no pattern to it at all though it can be terrible or fine at peak times or at 4am, or when the house is full or when I'm in by myself.

 

I thought my problem was initially solved by stopping my PC from searching for wireless devices once I had connected (netsh wlan set autoconfig enabled=no interface="Wi-Fi"). Turns out this only fixed a small part of the problem although it did help.

 

Then today while doing a ping test in cmd I had lost 30/30 packets to www.google.com. Although I was still browsing and streaming fine.

 

Just looking for any sort of advice tbh, I have ordered a new PCI wifi card anyway so  we'll see if that does anything. Mostly I'm just confused by the apparent randomness of my issues.

 

Thanks in advance for any ideas!

[Donut417]

3 hours ago, Jay123 said:

So I've just moved into a new house in which I can no longer have an Ethernet cable ran to my computer. However the router is only in the room directly below my PC so I didn't think there would be too much of an issue. A friend gave me what seems to be a decent quality USB adapter but my connection varies so much.

 

Sometimes I'm getting 999+ ping in all games, sometimes it's fine (30-80). There's no pattern to it at all though it can be terrible or fine at peak times or at 4am, or when the house is full or when I'm in by myself.

 

I thought my problem was initially solved by stopping my PC from searching for wireless devices once I had connected (netsh wlan set autoconfig enabled=no interface="Wi-Fi"). Turns out this only fixed a small part of the problem although it did help.

 

Then today while doing a ping test in cmd I had lost 30/30 packets to www.google.com. Although I was still browsing and streaming fine.

 

Just looking for any sort of advice tbh, I have ordered a new PCI wifi card anyway so  we'll see if that does anything. Mostly I'm just confused by the apparent randomness of my issues.

 

Thanks in advance for any ideas!

I find that USB adapters are more trouble then they are worth. While some people have luck with them, I see a lot of negative comments about them. The PCI express card will most likely work great and solve the issues. If the router is directly below the room, then I see you having no issues getting a signal. When I used WiFi, my router was one floor down and one room over. Thru two drywall and plaster walls, I was able to get a great signal on 5 Ghz, Using a wireless N card. 

[Alex Atkin UK]

This would not be unusual if the USB adapter is only using 2.4Ghz rather than 5Ghz where there is less interference in general.  Random performance issues are not at all unusual with WiFi due to its nature.

[Jay123]

Yeah, dropped £60 on an ASUS PCI card with an external antenna (overkill ik) and moved everything onto 2.4GHz apart from my PC. Getting 15 ping in game and 0 loss. Well worth imo.

[KirbyTech]

PCI card with external antenna is the way to go, less than $100 also putting in your own SSID would be good. I would say get a Unfi AP Lite and run a 5GHz connection just for yourself.

[circeseye]

question...are you seeing other wireless routers near by?

if so maybe your routers running on the same wifi channel others are....try changing the routers wifi channel..or if your able to, ask your neighbors what wifi channel they are running on and then change yours to a distant channel

[Donut417]

6 minutes ago, circeseye said:

ask your neighbors what wifi channel they are running on and then change yours to a distant channel

OR use apps like WIFi analyzer that can do that exact task without getting your neighbors involved. To be honest, most people use ISP provided boxes and have no idea what a WiFi channel is. So asking will probably not give any results. 

[circeseye]

3 minutes ago, Donut417 said:

OR use apps like WIFi analyzer that can do that exact task without getting your neighbors involved. To be honest, most people use ISP provided boxes and have no idea what a WiFi channel is. So asking will probably not give any results. 

(facepalm) yea aint that the truth lol lol i forgot all about that program lol its been so long needing something like that

[Alex Atkin UK]

The issue with phone WiFi analysers is not all phones are able to show the channel width, so you can't always spot overlapping channels.