I’m having a strange problem with my home WiFi and I don’t really understand what is going on.
Most of the time the WiFi icon shows full or almost full signal, but websites randomly take forever to load. Sometimes YouTube starts in good quality and then drops to blurry, then after a minute it becomes normal again. Spotify usually works, but sometimes it pauses for a few seconds like the internet disappeared.
The weird part is that speed tests are not always bad. Sometimes I get almost the full speed from my plan, and 10 minutes later it feels like dial-up. It is worse in the evening, especially when everyone in the apartment building is probably home.
I already restarted the router, changed DNS, forgot the network and connected again. It helped for like one day, then the same thing came back.
Full WiFi bars don’t mean the WiFi is actually clean.
If you’re in an apartment and it gets worse in the evening, first thing I’d check is what channels your neighbors are using. Especially on 2.4 GHz. You can have strong signal from your router and still have terrible performance if half the building is shouting over the same air. Use NetSpot and look at the channel graph. If you’re on 2.4 GHz, try 1, 6, or 11. Don’t use random channels like 3 or 8 because they overlap with everything and make everyone sad.
@SecurityMan_N I checked my router settings and it is currently on “auto channel”. Is that good enough or should I choose manually?
“Auto channel” is basically router speak for “I picked a channel once five years ago, good luck now”. It rarely actually scans the environment in real time. Sometimes it works out, but half the time it just camps on the dumbest option forever. You’re always better off checking the actual congestion yourself instead of trusting the auto setting. Also, if you’re still running everything on 2.4 GHz, just switch over to 5 GHz for any device that supports it. The range is shorter, but the airwaves are way less crowded.
There’s a nuance here. If the air is crowded, between full overlap and partial overlap, it’s usually better to go with full overlap.
@SecurityMan_N Wait, really? That sounds backwards.
@SecurityMan_N Huh. I just googled it and yeah, this is actually a thing.