Hi all,
I live in a student dormitory. The internet speed in my room is 10Mbps however next to the door and passageway it hits 200Mbps. The distance is only few meters !
I am suspecting I might be connected to a distant router?! For example, l am in my room now and the internet speed on my phone is hitting 200Mbps which is 20Mbps on my PC.
What can I do in this case? Thanks all !
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If your computer has a Realtek/ralink/Mediatek wifi radio, you would probably benefit from upgrading to an Intel radio. Intel radios handle congested environments better than Realtek ones. In the suburbs it doesn’t matter, but in a college dorm it should be a noticeable improvement.
It has to do with the nuances of how the radios detect and decode 802.11 frame preambles. Realtek radios are less sophisticated, and will often fail to receive stronger signal frames that collide with weaker signal frames. Intel radios do a better job, and usually pick up the strongest signal frame even when there’s a collision. In a college dorm, there’s collisions pretty much constantly.
Guys, you are all awesome. That’s why l love Reddit!
I think l found the problem but not sure how to solve it: when my laptop was connected on 5Ghz, the speed was insane and bypassed 200Mbps. However when l got disconnected and reconnected it went to 2.4 GHz and the speed went down again !
How can l force the wifi to be 5GHz?
Your room could be constructed with metal stud walls, so blocking the signals
electrical wiring in the wall or appliances interfering. i have the exact same thing in my room lol
Have you considered just plugging your PC into a wired network port instead of using wireless? There’s a good chance you have a port in your room. Most dorms were wired with them long ago because students needed internet and wireless didn’t exist. People tend not to use wires as much anymore but the ports are still there.
Turn off auto negotiation in your NIC settings or acces the 5ghz channel instead off 2.4ghz. also check if your nic even support such speeds
If your phone is getting 200mbps then just tether your phone to your computer and get the net via the phones wifi card.
Idk what happened recently, but newer phones absolutely suck as tethers, my s22 will barely send more than like 5-10mbps to my pc, if it works at all.
Is there an option for 2.4ghz or 5ghz?
5ghz is faster however 2.4ghz is more consistent when you’re further away from the router.
Just a thought.
Just for the sake of clarity, 5ghz isn’t any faster in and of itself, its just a much less “busy” frequency. You are correct that 2.4ghz can travel further due to being a lower frequency, but it isn’t inherently slower, there is just a lot of traffic on that frequency in densely populated areas, which can have an adverse effect on your speed.
Edit: a typo and removed a word due to grammar
Either the wireless network wasn’t designed properly to provide a good signal coverage, or there are things causing interference in your room.
Are there a lot of other electronics or heavy dense objects near where your PC is? It might be worth getting an external usb wifi adapter with an extension cable so you can set the antenna closer to the door.
Large facilities like dorms will usually have multiple routers/wifi repeaters which all have the same name to their wifi network. So it could be possible that your devices are connecting to different routers in both rooms, one might be close but has shitty bandwith (maybe due to technical issues or too many devices connected) and one is maybe further away but offers much higher network speed. Your devices will usually prefer the router which they get the best connection to, even if that routers network speed sucks.
Sadly I don’t know if there are ways to overwrite your devices preferences for which router they should connect to, but I could imagine that there would be software solutions to this (if it’s in fact a router issue).
Had a similar situation, my room is I get on my Xbox 200+mbps but when I used my desktop PC with a bog standard WiFi adapter it was struggling to get 50mbps and kept dropping signal during downloads.
I ended up buying a well reviewed USB WiFi adapter with a good antenna and now get the full 200mbps. This might not work in your case but it’s worth a try.
The USB WiFi adapter I got was tplink archer v2. 0
Don’t buy anything until youve actually checked what the problem is. It could be interference, but it could also be AP prioritization, dorms usually have their access points distributed across, buildings, and they’ll prioritize whichever has the highest signal strength, which isn’t necessarily the one with the best speed/latency.
There’s plenty of tools online for checking wireless signal strengths, and Router MAC.
I’d download something like wifiinfoview, and look at 2 things before buying a repeater or anything like that.
In wifiinfoview, Look at the SSID (wifi name) is highlighted green, thats the one youre connected to. Make a note of the RSSI and MAC address fields.
Then go next door and watch, first check to make sure the highlighted field doesn’t change to a different MAC, if it does the problem probably isn’t interference, and you can look online how to lock your device to the faster one.
If it doesn’t change, then watch the RSSI, the closer to 0 the number gets, the better the signal. So if you go next door and the number changes dramatically, it’s safe to assume there is some kind of interference between your room and this one.
Could be electrical (microwaves, faulty wiring) but is probably something physical in or on the wall connecting you. Repositioning your devices can help, but outside of using a physical cable, there aren’t any solutions that don’t have downsides.
Find out what the actual problem is and do research to find out which solution is best for you.
Also check if your computer is using the latest wifi standard, a Wifi6 adapter will get better signal than Wifi5