WiFi signal weirdness

[chimp]

I know what you're thinking, "oh boy another WiFi thread" but this time is a bit of a different tale.

 

My WiFi has been dropping out for weeks, I would reboot the router and the speed would drop from my usual 50mbps down to barely anything in the space of a single speedtest. My BT router which I have the Duma connected to works just fine.

 

I've had a browse through all the other threads of people complaining of the same issue and tried all the troubleshooting - checking channel interference, trying with WiFi workaround enabled and disabled etc.

 

I assumed it was the WiFi chip in the router (since everything connected to ethernet continued to get the full 50mbps) so I ordered a wireless access point and turned off the Duma WiFi to see if that did the trick.

 

Only, I'm getting the same problem... Even with the access point hooked up to the Duma it'll still go from 50 down to 0.02 or thereabouts within a single speedtest. I'm utterly lost at this point, aside from there being some kind of military grade signal jammer sat next to my network equipment I'm at a loss, anyone have any suggestions?

[major masingil]

it could be the wifi channels you're using are really congested with your neighbors networks.  Find a wifi analyzer app on google play and use it to see which channels are least congested. I used Netgear's WiFi Analytics app at my place

[Netduma Jack]

Hi, welcome to the forum. I'd definitely recommend Major's suggestion above, that sounds like your best bet for now. Did you check for military-grade signal jammers though...?

 

Nah, the channel suggestion should in theory solve this issue. If it doesn't try a hard reset. (To do this, switch off your Modem and your Netduma. Wait 5 minutes then power on the Modem. Wait another minute then power on your Netduma).

[chimp]

Thanks for your help, though as I mentioned in my first post I did try pretty much every other channel on the router and it didn't make much difference.

I've also out of curiosity run speedtests on other WiFi devices (since I know it's got nothing to do with wired connections), and the results are really weird - on my laptop, the connection never drops and sticks at around 40 Mbps, but on a few different Android phones and my friend's iPhone and iPad, the connection still drops to barely usable speeds.

[Netduma Fraser]

I'd assume its an incompatibility issue between clients and router. Do you know if the new devices use Qualcomm WiFi chips and does the one that work use something else?

[chimp]

All the Android phones I've tried definitely use Qualcomm chipsets, not entirely sure who supplies Apple WiFi chips though. The laptop which doesn't see any speed loss is a Dell XPS, its network properties also list its WiFi chip manufacturer as Qualcomm.

[Netduma Jack]

On 9/2/2018 at 1:00 PM, jeesh101 said:

All the Android phones I've tried definitely use Qualcomm chipsets, not entirely sure who supplies Apple WiFi chips though. The laptop which doesn't see any speed loss is a Dell XPS, its network properties also list its WiFi chip manufacturer as Qualcomm.

Hi Jeesh - sorry for the late reply, I think your post got overlooked during the forum migration. (We hope you're enjoying the new forum look though!)

It sounds like the access point makes no difference to the issue, so that lays the blame solely on the R1 or the upstream equipment. Just to clarify, this issue doesn't happen when your R1 is disconnected and you run speed tests (on the affected devices) when they're connected to your Modem network?

You say your Laptop is on a Qualcomm chip, as are the Android phones you've tried. Yet the phones you tried get the speed issue and the laptop doesn't? This effectively rules out a chip incompatibility unless it's only related to a specific chip model (which to me doesn't seem to add up - as far as I'm aware, once a chip manufacturer is supported it should affect all models)

Also worth clarifying - on the affected devices are you certain that the speed test is accurate? This could be an incompatibility with the speedtest itself (which can be caused by browser / network bugs). Are you unable to use the Internet / download properly on those devices?

[chimp]

No problem, sure you guys have been busy with it haha.

That's right, the access point made no difference at all, everything that ran slowly did so with or without the access point attached.

When connected to my BT hub and not the R1, everything runs at full speed, but when connected to the R1, pretty much every wireless device (except the laptop, weirdly) slows to a crawl, despite all the clients I've tried having Qualcomm chips as far as I can tell.

I'm sure the speedtest is accurate - I first noticed the issue when I had videos buffering non-stop, refusing to load or loading in the lowest possible quality, which is when I started speedtesting everything

[Netduma Jack]

Another quick suggestion would be distance - have you been testing these devices at the same distance away from the router? I'd recommend 2-3 metres - if you have a device too close to the router when you're using WiFi it can cause these types of issues.

Also how many WiFi networks are in your area? If your home is getting bogged down by tonnes of WiFi networks it could be a factor potentially.

Have you tried a hard reset or a factory reset?

[chimp]

Yes I made sure to eliminate distance as a possible cause by sitting all the devices equally far away when testing them.

I've used a WiFi monitoring app on the laptop to check the amount of networks close by, it shows very few so I doubt that'll be having much of an effect.

Tried both hard resetting and a full factory reset, gave both another try just now and still no joy