Sporadic Periods of Slowdown

Hello everyone,
I have a pretty annoying problem with my Internet connection that I can't seem to figure out. Very randomly my speeds will just drop on my laptop, and I'm not sure if it's my laptop or the foundation. Just a couple of minutes before typing this I clicked on a video on YouTube and the thing wouldn't even buffer. Now though it's working as it's supposed to. I have FiOS from Verizon and I think my average speed is supposed to be 25 Mbps. I was checking during the slowdown on speedtest and it showed 15 Mbps, but even when it jumped back up to 20ish I was still having slowdown on that YouTube link.

I notice this MUCH more when I'm playing a game. I'll be playing League of Legends and all of a sudden my ping just jumps like crazy. Like I said, I'm not sure if this is the Internet itself or the laptop. There will be moments of lag even when no other device but my laptop is connected to the Internet. The other day a friend of mine was playing something on my desktop while I was playing a game on my laptop and the ping jumped for me for quite some period of time while his was jump fine.

I think a temporary solution was to restart the computer. I would Alt+Tab out of my game and kill explorer.exe and restart it again. My ping would go back to normal, but there was a high chance the lag would jump again. I would say the usual period of slowdown is normally 5 minutes before returning to normal speed, and it's random how many spurts of this will happen within a certain time period.

I don't know if something is sucking network speed on my laptop or what. I don't have torrents or anything but I'm not sure why killing explorer.exe and restarting it lets it return to normal. Any advice would be helpful.

 

I had the same problem that you have and I also have Verizon Fios Internet. I created a thread about YouTube throttling in this forum section. It is likely a combination of your ISP and YouTube limiting bandwidth while trying to stream videos. I changed my DNS address to Google's public server and it helped quite a bit. Every once in a while at peak times buffering will slow down, but it never totally stops anymore. It is a partly due to slow YouTube cache servers that choke your fast connection. It likely effects all the devices on your home network. There is another fix that is linked in my thread that limits 2 IP range in an effort to bypass these slow servers, but you have to block a wide range of IP addresses. Try one or both, it helped make watching YouTube videos bearable.

 

If you suffer from issues on a notebook connected via Wi-Fi and don't see the same latency issues on a desktop connected via Ethernet cable it is a Wi-Fi problem.
It might be worth updating Wi-Fi drivers and using inSSIDer to see what wireless channels are being used by neighbors and subsequently changing the one you use so you would have less interference.

Technically speaking it's better to be on one channel with multiple people than be on an adjoining channel that is partially overlapping since Wi-Fi does have ways of dealing with more networks on one channels (at the expense of bandwidth) but doesn't have any mechanisms to deal with noise from overlapping channels.
That is theory- in practice it's not always the case and sometimes it's better to be on a channel that is overlapping with one or two networks than to be on the same one with 6 networks and not overlap with any networks on adjoining channels.

 

Check the location of your router and make sure there isn't anything that could interfere with it like an air conditioner, cordless phone, microwave, baby monitor, or even your neighbor's wireless network as stated above. Now that I have my ACs installed in my house I get poor signal in some locations outside my home (especially in line with an AC unit and my router). I think it is not a coincidence that you are experiencing throttling when visiting specific sites or IP addresses. So it could be your ISP or likely YouTube that is the culprit. Maye try hooking up to your router via ethernet cable to see if the problem persists. If it does then it's not your WiFi and you can focus your attention on other possible causes.