Why could Wifi be slower on my device than other household devices?

[Android Central Question]

Background: I have recently had issues with my Wifi that I think were largely solved. These issues involved drops in Wifi connection across all devices, lasting about 40 seconds, and apparently also lower download and upload than I should be getting (40mbps each way is what I pay for).

After an engineer split the SSID, I experienced jumps of speed from one channel to the next (from around 13mbps to 27mbps) across almost every single device (some Android devices, an Xbox, a PC and an iPad).

However, these results were not reciprocated on my own Android Phone (Samsung Galaxy A5 2017). In fact, I experienced slight decreases in both download and upload speed (tests were conducted about a dozen times during different times of the day around the entire house).

I am happy to add any more details, as I do not know what is relevant (fairly new to all of this stuff). It could be this problem is not related to my device at all, so sorry for that. Thanks for any help.

 

[Rukbat]

There's no reason for "split SSIDs", unless you mean different SSIDs for 2.4GHz and 5GHz, which you should have, otherwise how can you tell which one you're connecting to?

Check the channel the router is on (there are a lot of apps that show you both frequencies) and make sure one, the other or both isn't (aren't) on the same channel as another signal. If that's the case, connect to the router (without knowing the make and model, no one can guess the address, but you can find it at https://portforward.com/router.htm) and change that channel (the 2.4GHz or the 5GHz) to one that's not being used by anyone else. That should bring your speed up a bit. But ... if you have a lot of devices downloading a lot, all of them will be slower - that 40mbps isn't per device, it's shared among all devices. If a few people in the house are watching streaming video, that can eat 5mbps per video stream. And it doesn't matter if you're on 5GHz or 2.4GHz - unless you're a few walls from the router. The 40mbps is still all that's coming into the house. Splitting bandwidth between them is ridiculous. If only 1 person is using the router at the moment, why shouldn't that person get the full 40mbps? If 2 are using it, they're spitting the max download speed in half if they're both downloading at 20kbps at the same time, which would be unusual. (Even video stream or a file download wouldn't take that much.)

I'd turn off any "apportioning" the "engineer" (actually probably a quickly-trained technician) set up and let both radios (that's what's in the router - a 2.4GHz radio and a 5GHz radio) run at full speed. (I'm currently running a few Ethernet connections, a couple of 2.4GHz connection and a 5GHz connection, all running at full speed, and still getting just a hair more than I'm paying for.

(BTW, 40 both ways isn't normal, it's usually sold as high speed down, slower speed up. [How fast can you type? 1kbps? I doubt it.])

Oh, and how are you checking your speed? You should be within a couple of feet (2, not 10) of the router (laying the phone on the router will work too) and use something like speedtest.net.

 

[VidJunky]

Wow, that's a lot of technical right there, and I was kinda lost when your said split SSID. Anyway, I have a couple of things...

One I have a Samsung and my phone hates 5G WiFi. I get horrible internet with it, my browser literally creeps along like I'm on dialup. Someone with a Samsung will jump in here and tell me they have the best experience on 5G and hey I'm happy for you, I just know what happens to me.

Two I felt like thru your whole description of the problem that it's your device that is slow. Not like you got a stupid device but like something is running or open or somehow otherwise not performing optimally. I don't know how much I trust speed tests but you could try one and if you did I would try it under these three conditions. One just do it, no restart, no closing anything just open and do it after the phone has been up for awhile. Two try it first thing after a restart, before you play that game you like, before you check a text, power on run the test. Finally try it with the phone in safe mode. Safe mode prevents most apps from opening until the user opens them. This will give you the cleanest test as there should be nothing running in the background.

Actually if like you to try the safe mode test doing whatever it is that causes you to feel like your device is running slow and I'll tell you why. Most devices are setup to run optimally with get little to no settings tampering. Changing bands, and going deep into settings is just not something that needs to be done. Sure you may have to restart a router once in awhile but changing A to B, changing security protocols and trying to match frequencies is usually not necessary and when it is, dozens of people post about it, Google searches show up about it, stuff like that.