Hey all, weird issue and I’m not sure where to start.
For the last couple of weeks my Wi-Fi has been acting up almost every evening, usually somewhere between 8:30 and 10 PM**.** During the day it’s mostly fine. But at night my phone and laptop start lagging, video calls freeze, YouTube buffers, and sometimes devices disconnect for a minute and reconnect by themselves.
My router is in the living room, and I mostly notice the problem in the bedroom and at my desk. I haven’t changed anything recently.
Basically trying to understand what usually causes something like this?
Do you have a lot of neighbors?
@Present-Implement42 Yeah, definitely. I’m in a pretty big apartment building, and when I open the Wi-Fi list on my phone, I see a ridiculous number of networks. I didn’t count, but it’s easily 20+ SSIDs, maybe more.
Then Wi-Fi interference is very possible. At night all your neighbors’ routers, TVs, consoles, phones, and smart speakers wake up and start using airtime. If your router is on a crowded 2.4 GHz channel, it can get ugly fast. Run NetSpot or another Wi-Fi analyzer during the time when it happens, not at noon when everything looks fine. Check nearby networks, channel overlap, and signal level in the rooms where Wi-Fi drops. If you see half the building sitting on the same channel, try changing channels or moving more devices to 5 GHz.
It could also be something in your own place: cloud backups, phone photo sync, smart cameras uploading, console updates, TV apps updating, laptop backup, stuff like that. Try the dumb but useful test: when it starts happening, turn off or unplug devices one by one. Scheduled backups are sneaky. They can make the network feel broken and then magically disappear later.
Thanks, this makes more sense than assuming the router is just randomly dying.