Ask HN: WiFi Congestion?

Sometimes it's just the result of having shitty wifi hardware. Thankfully, it's pretty easy to test. Is it only one device that keeps getting disconnected, like only your laptop but not your TV or phone or anything else?

If so, get some cheap USB wifi adapter and see if that's any better. If it is, you can try to upgrade your laptop's internal wifi card to something better (or keep using the USB one). Some of the cheaper ones that come with budget laptops are just... bad.

Otherwise, if it's multiple things disconnecting all the time, it's your router. Try a different one, or ask your ISP to give you another model if you're renting yours together with your modem.

Regular wifi should be able to handle congestion no problem. That's what the channels are for, and any half-decent hardware should be able to handle home use OK. I do all that at home without losing connection. Sure, it slows down once the bandwidth is saturated, but nothing gets disconnected altogether.

One thing to watch out for, though... are you using 2.4 GHz for your connections? If so and you're near a microwave or an old-fashioned cordless phone (for landlines), those can interfere with wifi. 5 GHz is less noisy but doesn't have as much range, and can't penetrate walls and floors as well.

The first thing to determine is if the problem is with your laptop or your router/access point, which you can do if you have more than one device that can connect to wifi. If the connection goes down for both devices simultaneously, then it's the wifi. If one device goes down and the other stays up, it's the laptop.

I had this happen on routers/access points that had bad software, and fixed it by installing DD-WRT. This was a very long time ago.

Is your router configured to serve both 2.4ghz and 5ghz on the same SSID? Does the laptop support 5ghz? Is your local RF env particularly noisy/congested? What does the noise floor look like?

>Im at my wits end here.

I know what you mean.

If it is congestion it might help to try and find a wifi channel (frequency) that is less utilized by other routers nearby, because they may have signals that sometimes reach stronger into your area than your own wifi.

You can use some wifi survey software to see what channels are in more popular use by your neighbors at the time, and the relative strengths, as well as overlap to adjacent channels.

Most routers are going to automatically search and dynamically change channels to avoid congestion on their own, so you aren't expected to need to do this manually. But sometimes that's what it takes to outperform your router's algorithm in the face of airwave competitors which can easily outnumber it.

If instead you choose a fixed wifi channel on your own router, neither it nor your PC will need to go through any of the occasional auto-channel-changing routine, which itself is an opportunity for discontinuity from either end.

Plus it may take a while but eventually the nearby interfering routers will behave as if they recognize that yours is standing its ground on the frequency you have staked out, and they'll all move away from you. So if you're lucky it can get better through time.

It can be an improvement to disable all but a single 2G or 5G band on the router, plus on the PC too unless you need something like a portable device to pick up all frequencies wherever you go.

Another way to narrow the focus with auto-networking in general is to pick either ipv4 or ipv6, disable the other one and see if that's any better. Which can also be done on router and/or PC.

Plus it's Windows :)

Now that you've got your current versions of drivers and software installed, and browsers updated, if you haven't yet booted to safe mode and back, it's not a moment too soon :) Still quite the frequent miracle-worker since W9x.

Sometimes while in safe mode I like to open Device Manager, show Devices By Connection, and show Hidden Devices. Look around and see if there are any phantom conflicting devices to uninstall. Often will just look under Volume Manager and uninstall all the hidden phantom volumes which can accumulate un-necessarily. I consider them kind of distracting. It's harmless and any useful virtual volumes will re-generate in more current form if the same USB devices are connected in the future.

Returning from safe mode there will be a bit of a re-reckoning but after that it will boot as fast as normal again.

You can further shake up all devices without uninstalling anything if you delete all the .PNF files in C:\Windows\INF. These are just preprocessed INF files and you might benefit from fresh ones here. Don't delete the INF files themselves, they are part of your device driver packages.

You may find there are hundreds of PNFs to delete, but usually only a handful are (not even) "needed" in everyday operation, which will be simply regenerated as encountered. PNFs were actually useful in Windows 3.1.

There are also the .PF files in C:\Windows\prefetch which can carry unfavorable behavior from one reboot to the next. These were only intended for HDDs so they wouldn't seem as unresponsive as SSD, but even with HDD you can't tell the difference. I shitcan them all after disabling Sysmain in Services.msc so the .PFs don't regenerate at all.

Further escalation would be to uninstall the wifi networking hardware itself in device manager while you are in safe mode, then boot into bios and if possible disable the wifi in bios. Power completely down, then restart. If Windows can not detect your wifi it will still be a normal boot and all the built-in Windows networking components will accommodate functioning without any wifi. Then with more restarting (after re-enabling wifi in bios, if previously disabled), Windows will detect wifi and guided by the appropriate INF file go through the procedure of "freshly" installing the drivers you already had before.

Then there's actually installing different wifi drivers, if that's even the problem who knows. So this can often be a minimum of 3 choices, the drivers you had before, a manufacturer's download, or Windows Update which can sometimes have more than one version to choose from itself in its Catalog. Only one of which is possible to be the "best" performer. So the odds are stacked against you from the beginning :(

>if! i use it a lot(?) . . .

You also might need at least 16GB of memory for that even if 8GB was fine a year ago.

>changed dns servers

In earlier W11 (and w10) there was great discrepancy in IP settings like this between the traditional Windows Control Panel vs the Metro style Settings for Network parameters. With Control Panel working as expected no differently than in Windows 7, the "modern" Metro alternative GUI failed miserably to perform very much at all trying to control the same hardware. Only the Control Panel reflected what is found using ipconfig.exe at CMD prompt. "Settings" seems to be fixed now if you are updated enough, but I still trust the regular Control Panel better.

Plus, probably more people than you think could use a trip to the CMD line, for a quick ipconfig /flushdns if nothing else sometimes.

And I'm trying to make it sound like I haven't been at my wit's end too much . . .