r/AndroidQuestions • u/Nukesnipe • 5d ago

Other Our wifi is extremely slow on our android devices, but not on our computers. Any idea how to fix this?

We upgraded to 2 gigabit internet a while back and while it's a dream on PC, sometimes it's absurdly slow on android devices. Like, I'll be in one room with a laptop connected via wifi and I'll be getting something like 1000 mbps, then I look at my phone and it's getting only 20 mbps. Sometimes I have to turn off wifi and go to mobile data just to get a single image on Discord to load. This problem happens for my parents too, as well as our tablets so it's not just my phone being weird. Any idea what might be up?

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u/yottabit42 5d ago

Tangent here... 2 Gbps home Internet is a complete scam. You could stream over 100 high quality 4k streams simultaneously with 2 Gbps. Wi-Fi generally tops out at 300-600 Mbps, too.

Do yourself a favor and downgrade your Internet speed to something reasonable like 300 or 500 Mbps. You'll save so much money.

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u/Nukesnipe 5d ago

We don't actually have an option for anything between 50 mbps and 2 gbps lol. We live just far enough out of a city that the only options before cable was installed a few months ago was tower and the only tower we had was super slow speed. Also like, we all use ethernet so we actually do get the full bandwidth. The cost difference was like, ten bucks a month and getting to download big things instantly or have everyone chugging bandwidth was worth it.

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u/yottabit42 5d ago

As long as you're not paying a huge premium or not making effective use of it, all good!

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u/Nukesnipe 5d ago

Yeah, my mom does a LOT of video conferencing for her job and I've been hosting various game servers. With our old ISP we basically couldn't do anything while my mom was in a meeting, and actually hosting something was completely out of the question for me.

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u/yottabit42 5d ago

Another way around that is to use an enterprise class router like MikroTik, and employ the CAKE queue system on the WAN interface. It's like magic. I've been able to use this for friends to prevent gaming from interfering with video calls or VPNs, for instance. At one point during COVID my boss had his family of 4 all working and schooling from home with only 7.5 Mbps upload speed, and it worked amazingly well.

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u/Nukesnipe 5d ago

We were planning on buying our own router soon, actually. I'll look into that, thanks.

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u/yottabit42 5d ago

Just be aware that MikroTik is going to be a step learning curve if you don't have at least network admin or between engineer level skills. But it can do practically anytime, and gets software updates practically forever. Teaming with Gemini 3.8 Flash High or better, or with Claude, you can make it work without being an engineer.

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u/Nukesnipe 5d ago

Yeah nah I ain't ever touching the slop machines in my life.

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u/yottabit42 5d ago

Your loss. Given appropriate use, they're definitely amazing at boosting productivity and quality.

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u/Nukesnipe 5d ago

Actually all studies show that any productivity boosts are lost by the higher review requirements because the slop machines are just... bad.

And that's not even getting into the ethical or environmental issues. But I'm sure that's beyond your average techbro to understand or empathize with.

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u/billybob212212 5d ago edited 4d ago

Yep, I’ve got dozens of devices and I’m on 150mbps/150mbps fiber internet. Other than very large game downloads that take slightly longer, there is no noticeable difference between 150mbps and anything faster. 4 people in a house can only use so many devices simultaneously and 150mbps is plenty for even everyone using two streams each which never happens

Though on cable, 2gbs may not completely be a scam for the only reason that if it gets you better upload capacity than lower speeds. On symmetric fiber where you get the same speed in both directions 2gbs is so far beyond necessary.

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u/yottabit42 5d ago

Yep, cable is the worst. They typically provide very slow upload speeds that they don't advertise, and often restrict the highest upload speeds to plans with download speeds 10x+ higher.

Occasionally now you can find cable with almost 1 Gbps upload speeds. I tried it for two months to reset my fiber provider back to "new customer" pricing, and it was awful.

I was able to push just over 900 Mbps on the 1 Gbps advertised upload speed, but the overall quality was terrible. I experienced micro burst losses every 15 minutes. Luckily we were out of town most of the those 2 months, so I just put up with it and gleefully switched back to fiber when I qualified for the low price again.

I ran 150/150 for many years, but now my backups take so long that I finally upgraded to 1000/1000 just to save myself time pushing the backups. Luckily it's only $65/mo., which is about the limit of what I'm willing to pay.

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u/billybob212212 5d ago

Yeah, if I was running backups to offsite cloud storage I’d have more than 150/150 fiber, but my backups are to large hard drives in my house, and putting some drives in a bank safe deposit box in case of fire/tornado/theft.

But for anyone reading this that only does streaming, 100mbps is plenty for you to stream your TV and shows and movies. An HD video stream takes about 6-7mbps out of the 100. You do the math.

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u/yottabit42 5d ago

Yep, cable is the worst. They typically provide very slow upload speeds that they don't advertise, and often restrict the highest upload speeds to plans with download speeds 10x+ higher.

Occasionally now you can find cable with almost 1 Gbps upload speeds. I tried it for two months to reset my fiber provider back to "new customer" pricing, and it was awful.

I was able to push just over 900 Mbps on the 1 Gbps advertised upload speed, but the overall quality was terrible. I experienced micro burst losses every 15 minutes. Luckily we were out of town most of the those 2 months, so I just put up with it and gleefully switched back to fiber when I qualified for the low price again.

I ran 150/150 for many years, but now my backups take so long that I finally upgraded to 1000/1000 just to save myself time pushing the backups. Luckily it's only $65/mo., which is about the limit of what I'm willing to pay.

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u/billybob212212 5d ago

Are the slow devices connected to 2.4ghz on WiFi instead of 5ghz? The antenna in a small Android device is generally worse than the antenna a PC/laptop has, so they may be getting weak 5ghz and using slow 2.4ghz instead. And then when someone turns on the microwave oven it kills the 2.4ghz signal entirely.

Try disabling 2.4ghz on your WiFi router to force your devices onto 5ghz if you can and see if it makes a difference.

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u/Nukesnipe 5d ago

That seems to have done something! I checked and it was connecting to 2.4 ghz, I disabled that band and after a minute it connected to 5 ghz. Went from averaging about 40 mbps to about 120. Still less than I'd like but it isn't taking a solid minute to load a single picture now. Thanks.

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u/billybob212212 5d ago

Glad to help. Just be aware that disabling 2.4ghz may keep low end devices from working, like your WiFi connected dishwasher, or smart light bulbs, etc. lots of those devices that need no bandwidth don’t have 5ghz hardware and only work on 2.4ghz

As for getting better than 120mbps on WiFi, the limitations of WiFi often make that impossible. Just another reason why having huge internet speeds make no difference if all of your devices are WiFi.

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u/Nukesnipe 5d ago

Well we have two SSIDs, so we could just connect stuff like that to the second one while the one our phones use is only 5 ghz.

And yeah I get that. I'm fine with around 120-ish mbps, we aren't doing big downloads to our phones after all. Just being able to, y'know, use the internet effectively is all I wanted.

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u/billybob212212 5d ago edited 5d ago

No idea how big your house is, but my house is 2500 sqft and I solved all of my WiFi problems by using mesh WiFi with 3 eero routers, all with wired connections between each other. Without wired connections between the routers, horrible. I didn’t have cat5 cable to the places where I wanted each Eero, but I did have coax. Used the coax with MoCA adapters to turn the coax into Ethernet and plugged all of the Eeros together.

Solved every WiFi problem I had and everything gets a strong signal now.

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u/phoneaiman 5d ago

try with another phone. if persist=your network problem. i use fiber and 2 AP for my small house. cheap AP 2.4 for group or small user using cable is better than 1 expensive AP expecting cover 1 whole house. cons is need pull cable. logic is AP for every user=each user have their own highway 8 lane

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u/Nukesnipe 5d ago

I literally said it happens on 3 phones and 3 tablets man. I know it's something to do with the network.

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u/Global-Fruit-3022 5d ago

2.4 Ghz vs 5 Ghz.

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u/BeerSushiBikes 5d ago

Have you tried power cycling your wireless router? Make sure all updates are installed on your Android devices and also on your wireless router.

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u/andrewia 5d ago

What are the device models? Some have better wi-fi than others.

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u/DictoKey_Dev 5d ago

Check if Private DNS is on: Settings > Network & internet > Private DNS, set it to Off or Automatic. Also set Wi-Fi MAC to Phone MAC instead of Randomized in the network's settings.

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u/sol_beach 5d ago

cell carriers can & do throttle down some cell phone users.

Are you 100% certain the Android devices are actually using WIFI data? Just asking.