I do a speed test and the speed looks good, but in real use everything feels terrible. Why?
Because a speed test and “good WiFi” are not the same thing. You can have decent speed on paper and still have bad latency, jitter, interference, weak signal, retries, all that fun stuff.
A speed test doesn’t really tell you: if your signal is unstable, if one room has terrible coverage, if your channel is crowded, if the connection keeps stalling for a second here and there. That’s why it can look fine and still feel awful.
@AutoPilot_2012 So what’s the best way to check what the WiFi itself is doing, not just the internet speed?
Get a good Wi-Fi analyzer, like NetSpot. It will show you the real picture: where the signal is weakening and where neighboring networks are causing interference. You’ll be able to see signal strength, nearby networks, see channel overlap, and get a much clearer picture of your radio environment. Plus, NetSpot has an active scanning feature, so you can check the local Wi-Fi path itself, rather than just checking the connection to some random server on the internet.
If one room feels bad and another doesn’t, that’s already a pretty strong hint that this is a WiFi problem, not just “the internet is slow.” So I’d start there: check the signal, check the channels, see what nearby networks are doing.
@Frag_King_XX I understand: a speed test simply doesn’t get the whole picture. I’ll focus on the signal, not the numbers in the test.