Troubleshooting High Latency Issues: Why Your Wi-Fi Might Be Slowing Down

Experiencing unstable Wi-Fi can be incredibly frustrating, especially when it disrupts your daily activities. Many users have encountered issues where their internet speeds plummet when other devices, particularly mobile phones, connect to the same network. Let’s delve into some potential reasons and solutions for these high latency issues.

Understanding Wi-Fi Latency

Latency refers to the delay before a transfer of data begins following an instruction for its transfer. An acceptable latency range is generally between 20 to 50 ms; however, experiencing delays as high as 1000 ms can severely impact your online experience, making activities like gaming or browsing virtually impossible.

The Issue at Hand

In my experience, my Wi-Fi has consistently been unstable. Specifically, whenever I use my mobile phone to browse the internet or play games, my desktop computer experiences significant lag. This problem manifests more prominently when my flatmate returns home from work, which suggests that the demand on our Wi-Fi network increases during those times.

We recently switched to a new internet provider and upgraded our router, expecting an improvement in performance. Unfortunately, the same connectivity issues persist. One interesting observation is that my desktop connects via a 2.4 GHz network, while our mobile devices operate on the 5 GHz band. This discrepancy might play a role in the overall performance of our network.

Investigating the Network

I conducted a Wi-Fi scan to gather more information about our connection. The results were quite revealing and highlighted specific areas that might be contributing to increased latency. Here is the scan result for reference.

Looking for Solutions

If anyone has encountered similar issues and found effective solutions, I would sincerely appreciate your insights. It would be incredibly helpful to learn how you overcame high latency problems on your Wi-Fi network.

Thank you in advance for your assistance!