Fast internet questions
Fast internet questions
My dad's old computer had very fast internet speeds because he put his modem right next to it. But I use a new "NETGEAR Orbi Whole Home Tri-band Mesh WiFi 6 System" (RBK752) from Amazon, which includes a router and a satellite extender that covers up to 5,000 square feet and connects to about forty devices using AX4200 technology. I connect through this new router over an ethernet cable made of Cat 8 wire. This cable is heavy-duty, waterproof, and works indoors or outdoors for up to 2,600 meters at speeds up to four hundred gigabits per second. I am running Windows 10 Pro on a GIGABYTE X570 motherboard that supports Wi-Fi, AMD processors, and RGB features. I also bought a new network adapter just recently because I thought something was wrong, but it didn't really help my situation either. My internet company is Xfinity, and my modem is called a xFi Gateway. When I use Steam or other games, download speeds stay high for about twenty seconds before suddenly dropping back down to very low numbers again.
First, your cable is probably fake. Real Cat8 cables are expensive and usually only used in data centers. You won't find them on Amazon. Shielded cables have big problems with home gear, the wires are too thin to work well. Hard-to-reach cables might seem fine at short distances, but if you don't have 10Gbit ports, Cat5e is better than anything else. Check your event log and see if the ethernet port keeps turning off. It's not likely, but sometimes your computer icons just look different on the desktop without it actually failing. I suspect most of your problem isn't really with the network connection at all. You probably just didn't run ethernet correctly. You might have followed marketing hype instead of reading the manual and put the mesh unit in a room where you can get good signal from your main router. Instead of using an ethernet cable, you used it as if it were a wifi card that plugs into USB. If your room has weak wifi, the mesh unit will just copy that bad signal. A mesh unit needs strong signal from your main router to send out a good signal. You can try putting the unit halfway between you and the router and running an ethernet cable to it. This is like moving your pc's wifi adapter closer to the router without actually moving the computer. It is very likely your issue is just poor wifi in that room. There isn't one simple fix for this. You might try other radio bands or change channels, but those won't help much because you can't stop bad signals from neighbors. You could also try putting the mesh unit in a better spot and then trying a different wifi card in your machine. Your best choice is to look for a way not to use wifi at all. Real ethernet over everything is great but often not an option for many people. If you have coax jacks in both rooms, you can check MoCA which usually gives 1gbit speeds with low delay. Another option would be powerline networks. They are sometimes slower than some wifi, but the speed and consistency make them good for playing online games.
The Orbi works pretty well. I've used it with 2 out of 3 Satellites for a while now. It has a backhaul option that I mostly use—Satellites aren't cheap, but if you can't hardwire them, it might be worth the money if the satellites are close together to each other. In my experience, they work just as well as hardwiring.
I would try using an ethernet cable again since wifi is messy. The middle part will mess up any tests because it sends random errors. This problem happens often with wifi, making testing hard when you have a connection like that. Your first test is to leave the ping running to 8.8.8.8 while doing your download and see if there are packet losses. It probably affects both computers in the house but it's best to check this. You can also ping the router IP, but this almost never gets an outage on ethernet because it works really well with those cables. This is very common when you use wifi instead of ethernet, which is why it will ruin your test results. On ethernet it only happens if you used a cheap flat cable instead of a real one that has enough wire for the distance. It happens more often if you have a long run. If this looks fine then something on your computer might be causing the problem. Common ones are programs called "gamer" network stuff that comes with motherboards and video cards like bloatware. A common name is cfosspeed but any software that says it favors one type of traffic over another should be removed. Steam does strange things at times. Maybe try downloading a big windows install image from microsoft and watch the download speed in resource monitor to see if it jumps around.