Hello gents.
My problem in short:
I have a rather laggy broadband connection which at times can work out fairly well but more often than not it bogs down, not always leading to disconnects but it just lags like mad.
My equipment:
The issue in more detail:
I have been contemplating going back to a wired connection, however I got used to not having extra wires around the apartment. Terrible apartment layout makes this issue only worse.
I've been pinging some servers around, but at this point in time it looks like everything is working OK, I'll try doing it again later.
My problem in short:
I have a rather laggy broadband connection which at times can work out fairly well but more often than not it bogs down, not always leading to disconnects but it just lags like mad.
My equipment:
- ZXV10 W300B router - absolute piece of trash. Supposedly there are more than one models of these routers, one without and one with WDS. My router does not have any WDS options in the web interface. I tried viewing HTML of the options page, but haven't found any hidden options.
- This router has been provided to me by my "broadband" provider and I'm not certain who's the owner of this device, I'm paying some sort of lease for it.
- Installed firmware version - W300BV1.1.2c_ZRD_CT1_IPV6
- Delock WLAN_N 300 MBps (chipset RTL8191S) WLAN adapter. I'm using the default windows application to manage the adapter from my desktop.
- Windows 7 64bit on an aging PC with some possible USB issues, maybe power related but I don't know really.
The issue in more detail:
- I typically have about 60-80% signal strength, but at times it drops below that and that's typically followed by introduction of lag, which spikes for some time, sometimes a few minutes at other times longer than that. At times I have to restart the router while at other times it looks as if I need to eject the adapter and plug it back in to "fix" the problem. Which may mean there's an adapter issue or maybe simply the connection between the adapter and the router needs to be reestablished.
- There's a possible issue with the phone line in the building, i.e. phone cable quality. I have replaced my wall socket and made sure everything checks out there. There's a short phone cable coming from the socket going into the splitter and another short cable goring from it to the router.
- Funny thing is that I have a stronger signal coming from my neighbor down below, which is typically at about 80-100% so I obviously thought of possible interference. Acrylic Wi-Fi show's me that he's using 802.11 b/g on channel 1 with PSK-TKIP. I set mine to 802.11n, 20MHz bandwidth on channel 13. Acrylic shows this.
- My connection is the first one on the list, I don't understand why is my router not working on 5GHz since I explicitly set it to n mode. Either case, there's no channel overlapping, my neighbor is always on channel 1.
- Typically, when lag occurs if I try connecting with my phone to the router, it works more or less OK. However, if I stay at it for a while the connection may get laggy and some applications/games may show that they're losing connection to the server.
- Called my broadband provider. They aren't very helpful, they're basically insisting that I should check all of the equipment on my end before they make any checks on their own end. Sad matter of the fact is that a) I have doubts about my own hardware and b) the issue is sporadic and intermittent in nature, however it seems to be more expressed in the evening hours, usually when I'm online of course. Therefore probability for the "guy" to come and check the equipment at the exact moment the issue is going on is about 0.
- Connected to my phone in hotspot mode using the mobile data network. Did this in the middle of a lag fit and everything worked OK for a while.
- I wanted to use my older router Siemens SX763 as a WI-FI adapter, via means of WDS. However my ZTE doesn't have WDS apparently and I can't get the two to play nice so wasn't able to get the thing working. I did manage to do this previously, using this same Siemens model, but there was some other router model on the other end at the time.
I have been contemplating going back to a wired connection, however I got used to not having extra wires around the apartment. Terrible apartment layout makes this issue only worse.
I've been pinging some servers around, but at this point in time it looks like everything is working OK, I'll try doing it again later.