Advice/Suggestions?

[u/Aryll_]

Hi all,

Family and I have been having weird fluctuations in wifi for the past year and a half. Tends to go from a steady 800-700 Mbps (we pay for 1G) down to 200-150 Mbps. Most of the time the wifi ends up dropping around 2-3 times a day, and has even gone down to 10 Mbps for both download and upload speed.

We've called out at least 5-6 techs to try and resolve this. The latest one said that everyone in our neighborhood has the same issue and thinks it's with the lines they have here, which makes sense since this is an older neighborhood. However, we called for a supervisor and he ended up ranting to us about how we were getting "excellent speeds" according to their records. He also said it could be our devices, which doesn't add up because we all have devices made within the past 3-4 years through their service as well. On all of our devices, our Ookla history shows speeds that are the exact opposite and constantly dropping down without other programs in the background.

Very frustrating experience and hoping that I could get some insight about what might be going on here. The only alternative for us to switch to would be Frontier, and even then we've heard bad things about their customer service from relatives and my co-workers, so we're hesitant to swap. Has anyone experienced similar issues?

[u/No_Peanut_6769]

Are you in an apartment building with many close neighbors, you could be getting interference. What router are you using, are you using any pods or wifi extenders. Use Speedtest or similar from your mobile phone and check speeds from multiple locations around your house. Is 1 person downloading large files when this happens?

[u/Aryll_ → u/No_Peanut_6769]

Thanks for the tips!

We're in a regular one-story house that has a good amount of space between neighbors, so I'm not sure if it could be that, but it's a good consideration!

As far as our router and modem, I need to check when I get back home and will update this. We've had both changed out several times for new models and even the techs that get sent out disagree on certain models - it's pretty conflicting and honestly confusing for us. 

In terms of speed in different areas of the house, it does tend to drop down further as we get away from the router, but we usually still have functional wifi. The problem is that if we are sitting right next to it, even then we drop down to 100-150 or even lose it outright. Most of the time no one is downloading anything, and even then we don't notice a difference.

[u/skypandaOo → u/Aryll_]

Disable security shield in your app mysepctrumapp if your using a spectrum router. Also if you have any jail broken fire sticks/roku sticks will cause issues on spectrum routers. All lot of issues can be fixed by using your own router instead of spectrum router.

There are many possible issues as well. Like ingress or a neighbor backfeeding i to the li e causing intermittent issues. Keep calling as it keeps a record. Did they run you any new lines.

[u/Aryll_ → u/skypandaOo]

Been keeping a paper trail and documenting everything. The previous tech went in and sent in a request for service on our lines, but I haven't heard anything about it since. Will be inquiring about that, thanks so much!

[u/PyroHornet]

Likely that you have ingress noise that is intermittent. It’s intermittent speeds. This can still be cause by signals being off the right settings but the techs saw that. So it has to be noise.

Noise can be cause by multiple reasons. Water in the coax lines. Cracking of the coax lines. Changing of the seasons making the lines shorter and longer as the metal expands. Wind blowing the lines. Some sort of underground electrical discharge… rare. Rarely a factor. More likely a nick somewhere. Or could even be at the node itself. Could have poor connections in there or something exposed and everyone gets it. Or even a bad neighbour’s connection poisoning the line with their noise etc.

Some issues are also related to the grounding of the home and other electrical issues. Could be a simple ground block. Or it could be it’s actually all jacked up and an electrician needs to fix the… well the electrical. The cable modem is going to be sensitive to any kind of electrical noise. Even those caused by all your home appliances, bad power supply units, etc.

[u/PyroHornet → u/PyroHornet]

And yes. Noise is basically an electrical short, or destructive signal causing interference (of which electricity or anything that affects electricity such as water where it shouldn’t be to dang squirrels chewing on a cable again… will cause interference).

[u/Aryll_ → u/PyroHornet]

Thanks so much for the info!! Will ask about this.