Weird Wi-Fi latency spikes every 30 seconds — where would you even start? 

Wi-Fi Troubleshooting
1

I’ve got a fairly new UniFi setup at home with two APs, and Wi-Fi has been awful in a very specific way.

I’m seeing latency spikes every 20–30 seconds. Most of the time ping is normal, then it suddenly jumps into the 100–130 ms range for a second, then drops back down. It’s enough to make browsing feel weird and video calls pretty annoying.
Sample ping looks roughly like this:

PING 8.8.8.8 (8.8.8.8): 56 data bytes

64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=0 ttl=117 time=15 ms
64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=1 ttl=117 time= 19 ms
64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=2 ttl=117 time= 21 ms
64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=3 ttl=117 time= 48 ms

64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=4 ttl=117 time= 59 ms
64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=5 ttl=117 time= 103 ms

64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=6 ttl=117 time= 18 ms

64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=7 ttl=117 time=18 ms

64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=8 ttl=117 time= 134 ms
At this point I’m not sure if I’m looking at interference, scanning behavior, some UniFi setting, or firmware weirdness.

Where would you start?

2

That pattern looks more like Wi-Fi scanning / interference / radio behavior than raw ISP trouble. Since Ethernet is clean and it still happens with either AP disabled, I’d stop looking at the WAN and start looking at the RF side.

3

@Fast_pony_XXX I agree. I’d run a Wi-Fi scanner and see what the air looks like before changing more settings. NetSpot is useful for that. In Inspector mode you can watch nearby networks, channel congestion, and signal changes in real time. If the channel is crowded or something in the environment is causing the radio to get noisy, that’ll at least give you something concrete to work from instead of just flipping UniFi options.

4

This makes it much clearer where to start. I was already just tweaking settings at random. I’ll first check the ping to the gateway and the airwaves to confirm or rule out a Wi-Fi issue. At least this way I’ll stop wasting time digging through UniFi dashboards.

5

That’s the whole point of UniFi. A gorgeous interface, beautiful graphs, and then you spend three evenings trying to figure out why a simple home network suddenly requires the complex configuration of a huge corporate office.