Moved into a shared apartment and the WiFi has gotten progressively worse.
When I first moved in and the place was basically empty, I could get around 80–90 Mbps in my room. Now I’m usually somewhere around 20–30 Mbps, sometimes worse at night.
There are 3 access points in the building and one of them is literally right outside my bedroom door, so I assumed coverage shouldn’t be the issue. Windows shows a link speed of around 400 Mbps too, which makes the actual speed even more confusing.
The building has pretty thick concrete walls, but if the AP is that close, should it really be this bad?
Can’t run Ethernet without asking the landlord first, so trying to figure out whether there’s anything I can do on the WiFi side.
First thing: that 400 Mbps number is just the WiFi link rate. It does not mean you’re supposed to get 400 Mbps from the internet.
Did this actually get worse when more people moved in? Because if you were getting ~90 when the place was empty and now you’re getting 20–30 with a full building, I’d be thinking shared bandwidth or WiFi congestion before blaming the walls.
@Wild_cat_2000 End of last month I was basically the only person here and it was much faster. Now most of the rooms are occupied and evenings are definitely worse.
400 Mbps It’s the negotiated WiFi link rate between your device and the AP. Real throughput will always be lower, and it tells you basically nothing about how much bandwidth the building is sharing upstream. First test right beside the AP. If you’re still getting 20 Mbps there with a strong signal, concrete isn’t your main problem.
@404_Found Tried that. Standing basically underneath the AP I got about 55 Mbps at first, then did it again 10 mins later and got 23. Back in my room it’s around 18–25. So being closer helps sometimes, but not consistently.
Are those 3 APs actually wired back to the main router or are they repeaters? If they’re wireless repeating each other, there’s your first dumpster fire. If they’re Ethernet backhaul, then I’d start looking at channel congestion + how many people are hammering the same AP.
@ED_Sniper Asked the guy who manages the place. They’re all connected over Ethernet.
I’d scan the WiFi before changing anything blindly. NetSpot is good enough for this. Open the Channels view from your room and see where those 3 APs are sitting compared with everything else around the building. It’ll also show the signal levels, so you can tell which APs actually matter instead of counting every weak network you can see. If they’re all on overlapping 2.4 GHz channels or blasting wide channels in a packed band, that’s something the landlord can actually fix. Post the graph if you can.
@tech_guru23 Ok thanks, I’ll get home and download the app tonight.