Okay, I’m at my wit’s end. Wi-Fi in my parents’ new apartment is acting weird. The building gives each apartment its own Verizon network. My family’s devices seem fine on it, but my phone, laptop, and Steam Deck keep having issues. I’ll be connected, but speeds randomly drop to basically nothing — like under 150 kbps when it should be closer to 200 Mbps. Any idea what would cause only my stuff to struggle?
Listen, have you measured your speed using something like Speedtest, or is it just that it feels like it’s barely moving? “It seems slow to me” and “the test shows three kilobits” are completely different problems, and they need to be fixed differently.
If the other devices in the same room are fine, then I wouldn’t jump straight to bad Wi-Fi for the whole apartment. Could be band steering weirdness, adapter compatibility, power saving settings, or your devices all latching onto the wrong band for some reason.
@Training-Today9031 Yeah, that’s my fault – I haven’t done a direct comparison in one spot yet. I just noticed that mine is always lagging, while everyone else in the house has no problems. Guess I’ll have to run some tests.
To stop just guessing, I recommend scanning the airwaves with decent software. Use NetSpot, for example — it’s an excellent diagnostic app. In Inspector mode, it will show which networks are causing noise nearby, what channels they’re on, and how the signal strength fluctuates. Plus, it has the option to run a Survey with active scanning, measure the actual speed, and create a heat map of rooms. This will immediately answer all your questions: it will become clear whether the culprit is your neighbors’ routers, signal attenuation due to walls, or a problem with your laptop’s network card.
I’d also check whether your laptop / Steam Deck / phone are all preferring the same band. If they’re all hanging onto a weak 5 GHz signal while everyone else is happily sitting on 2.4, that would explain a lot.