Frage
Antwort
Lösung
For over a year we've been experiencing really bad internet at our apartment. You can be sitting right next to the router and still sometimes time-out from a page or have very slow download speeds. I talked about the download speeds going down badly sometimes (from 100mbps to 3mbps) and whenever I'm gaming I'm always experiencing many high ping spikes making it impossible to play online and usually getting me kicked from servers.
I went to figure out what the problem is because according to the Vodafone employee I spoke to over the phone everything seems to be ok from their tests.
First thing I did was to see which channels in the 2.4GHz band are saturated and which ones are not. After identifying the least busy channel I switched to it. This made no difference whatsoever.
Then, I swapped the wireless card from my laptop, Killer 1535, to a new one, the Intel AC9260. This also made no difference. I tested these cards at my friends' places and noticed that I did not have the latency issues there which means the problem must lie with our Fritzbox.
Lastly, I tried pinging the Fritz!box directly from my laptop. This means that I send a ping request to the router without the internet being involved at all. Here I noticed a very strange pattern. Some ping requests would be ok around 2~4ms, but there would be occasional spikes to 90ms or even higher every couple of seconds. I tested this with other devices in our apartment and it all had the same issue. This means that the router is somehow malfunctioning and can't handle the requests from our devices in a timely manner. Since the router is also our modem it's difficult to swap this out ourselves, as I've also read that it's impossible to use your own modem/router instead of the one provided by Vodafone. Obviously, after almost a year of utter frustration I'm glad to know what's causing our internet issues, but I would like to have the issue solved by getting a new modem/router. I've attached a picture of my ping readings.
