Yesterday I switched from TDS Cable internet to CenturyLink DSL 140Mbps. Everything is working fine and the speedtest comes back as it should except my son is having issues with the web. It is slow to load and sometimes doesn’t load a page at all. Diagnosing it at 3:30am and the fact that I’m away from home for a week now, here is all that I have. Everyone else doesn’t seem to have any problems.
His wifi adapter is 802.11n so 2.4MHz. It works fine with the old router but interestingly that router has two channels, one for the 2.4MHz and a second for the 5GHz channel. The new router being 802.11ac shows one channel and he can connect to it. And it is connected, I can see it uploading and downloading data like it should. I still have the old internet service so testing it with his computer, it worked fine but being in the morning no one else was streaming so I don’t think the issue is with the 140Mbps limit itself. So it’s a DNS issue right? It’s the same DNS everyone else uses. The server is my router 192.168.0.1 with the secondary being CunturyLink’s server, but even trying 8.8.8.8 or 1.1.1.1 did not resolve the issue.
Further testing planned. He is going to hook his rig up to a wired connection an test it to see if it is an issue with his computer and CenturyLink not liking each other.
I will put his USB adapter on my computer. If I can get my laptops to run on the 2.4GHz band, I will test those as well.
I plan on buying a better router and bridging that to the modem anyways, but I’d prefer to know what the problem is to see if that is the solution. My son is also planning to buy a 802.11ac compliant adapter but again the same caveat as will that solve the problem.
Any ideas of what the problem may be? I got the router off of eBay and it is the same one CenturyLink would have rented to me - C4000bz. I’m thinking it is the 2.4GHz channel on the modem and maybe it can be solved in the setup of the modem. Other than that, any ideas on what to test?
Is it only browser behavior or is other network traffic (email client, apps, network printer, Win updates, etc) affected?
If you put the original router back, does it work again? I’m skepical it’s a router problem but it’s easy to quickly try.
Different bands and channels is virtually never a cause or solution. However, just changing these settings sometimes makes it look like some RF thing [wiggles fingers magically] was interfering.
I didn’t have time to check. I checked that the idle updata and downdata were increasing normally. That’s how I mad sure he really was connected. I will have him test that with steam game or 2.
Yep. First thing I did to make sure it wasn’t just a coincidence.
My thought is maybe the problem is the 2.4GHz channel only was misbehaving. Not likely, but all of us in the tech world have seen stranger things.
Possibly there’s congestion on a particular wifi channel from a neighbor’s network. You could try running a wifi analyzer app on a phone to see what’s going on, or just try changing the wifi channel (1, 6, or 11) and see if there is any improvement.
When I see slow page loading after changing routers, I wonder about DNS settings. Is his DNS hard-coded, or is it somehow using the wrong DNS?
For each computer, open a CMD.EXE (DOS) window, and type the command IPCONFIG /ALL
See what the DNS settings are, they should be set by the router’s DHCP when it hands out addresses. If for some reason DNS is hard-coded or set wrong, you may be waiting for the first DNS to time out before it defaults to the next (proper) DNS.
I found years ago, the DNS Servers for some internet providers will not respond to DNS requests from a different internet provider’s network.
(DNS translates web names, like “Google.com”, into the IP address numbers. It’s the first step in connecting to a website…)
Your writeup is not consistent. You say you have a new 5Ghz-only wireless access point, and a 2.4Ghz-only wireless adapter connected to it (slowly). Clearly that cannot possibly be correct: if each actually supported only the one band, they would not be talking to each other at all (not even slowly).
In actuality, both 802.11n devices and 802.11ac devices should support both the 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz bands.
If the new access point is letting you pick only one channel, it is possible it is currently configured to offer only one band (2.4Ghz if the channel range is 1-11, 5Ghz if it’s 36-161).
The 5Ghz band offers better throughput and less neighbor interference, but with the tradeoff of generally less range and worse penetration through floors/walls. If the devices that still have good connectivity are relatively close to the new AP and there aren’t many floors/walls between them and the AP, while the device with a slow connection is farther away and/or on the far side of more floors/walls, that is likely an expected effect of a 5Ghz-only network.
The solution would be to enable 2.4Ghz, or add more 5Ghz access points (wired or meshed). Given the upstream connection of only 140Mbps, you don’t really need the bandwidth that 5Ghz can support.
A technique to help debug whether the problem is the WiFi link or the upstream internet connection: when the problematic client is experiencing slowness, ping the IP address of the local router (usually 192.168.1.1). If you see many dropped packets or latency more than about 10ms, the problem is with the WiFi between the client and the wireless AP, not the upstream connection.
That’s the magic wiggle finger part that is almost always a distraction. Consider a crowded highrise tenament or dense residential dormitory environment, literally hundreds of 2.4/5 GHz transmitters in shouting distance and thousands in sight out a window. If they could interfere with each other in any significant way, nothing would ever work. And it’s not just wifi: bluetooth, xbox controllers, zigbee controls, pet cams, wireless grill thermometers, all sorts of stuff is wizzing around out there.
However, just changing these settings sometimes makes it look like some RF thing [wiggles fingers magically ] was interfering.
802.1ac is backwards compatible with 802.1n I think.
I’d make sure the computer has the latest drivers for that NIC.
Then tell the computer to “forget” the network it links to in the house. Then re-add the network back.
If you have a CAT-5 network cable lying around try connecting the computer to the router with that cable. Disable Wi-Fi on the computer and make it use the cable connection. See if that changes things.
At an extreme (not that extreme really), in Device Manager, uninstall the network card. Restart, then re-install the network card (make sure you have the appropriate drivers for that specific card). Re-add your network (note: this may make all remembered networks go away so, if a laptop used at school and Starbucks those will need to be logged into again as well).
Try different browsers. Especially ones you have never used before. Do not “import” anything when using the new, test browser. Just see if it makes a difference.
It did work as I thought. He is going to get a 802:11ac adapter because why wouldn’t you in this day and age for less than $20 but at least we know we can fix the issue and I can cancel the old service now.