Help with WiFi drop by 50% Z13

I have a Z13 with stock Intel 6200 wlan card and a late model Belkin N+ router. All of the sudden, today, my Internet download speeds dropped from 40 Mb/s to about 20 and uploads from about 30 to 16. There have been no changes to anything that could cause electrical interference and I still get full speed hard wired via ethernet to the router. I've updated drivers, rolled back drivers, and nothing seems to help. The reason I suspect the Z is that my iPad has faster speeds - it's normal 27 Mb/s down, no change - while it used to be about 13 Mb/s slower. I know the speeds I have are nothing to complain about, but I have had faster speeds for two years and suddenly they have dropped.

Any suggestions appreciated.

 

Try changing the RF channel the Z13 is using - if there is a neighbouring router operating on the same channel, you could be getting interference.

 

Thanks ^ ^ It made a little bit of difference, but not much. Went from around 18 Mb/s to 24 Mb/s, still a far cry from 40+. I tried every channel and this was the best result.

Any other thoughts folks? This just happened, literally, overnight. Nothing changed inside my house and the laptop is 20 ft from the router in the same room. Verizon punts and says they are not responsible for wireless speeds (it does still get 40Mb/s + connected via ethernet.

 

Just quickly check to see if the 5GHz setting is enabled - sanity check. Btw. what connection speed are you getting for the Wifi connection?

Can you monitor your speed over time and see if it changes during the day/night? I have heard of a device called a video sender which is used to beam HD video over Wifi - it hogs all the available channels. If someone in your building is using it....

 

Try using inSSider from Metageek (free) to show what WiFi channels are in use then pick the clearest band. It helped me choose a clear channel.

Hope it helps.

 

First of all, thank you both for your helpful suggestions.

1) I do have 5GhZ enabled - any reason that should matter? I actually tried making 5, 2.4 or both enabled and there was no difference
2) I have not noticed any material difference at different times of day
3) The speeds I am getting are about 20Mb/s down, 17 up. I know these are not exactly slow but they are about 50% of what I have always gotten from my Verizon FIOS ISP service, and I still get the full 40 Mb/s download when I connect the laptop via ethernet.

Thanks, I will give it a try. I have manually re-set the router to just about every channel and there is good bit of difference, but the best at any one time gets me at most 23 Mb/s.

***Key question: could my router have punked out and would a new best-of-breed router be a wise move?

Thanks again for the kind assistance.

 

Weird symptoms...that's for sure.

Can you check if your router updated its firmware recently? Maybe they implemented something like WMM and activated it recently (WMM : The specification provides basic prioritization of data packets based on four categories - voice, video, best effort and background. ).

I have for example activated QoS priority rules so that my router prioritizes AirPlay packets, to make sure there is no lag in the audio I transfer. Maybe something like this activated itself during the course of a firmware update.

I think the problem is router-side, maybe the router is doing some kind of thottling or packet-prioritization, QoS or other.

Are your LAN speeds top-notch or are you getting interference there?
I think you should take the iPad out of the equation as its wireless cards can't really be compared with an Intel 6k2. Try with another PC.

If all else fails, try resetting your router to factory defaults.

 

@ Killer ^ Thanks for the insights and advice. In answer to your question, there is new firmware available for my router but I'm loathe to flash it now while something basic has gone wrong. Perhaps I will take the advice to reset it to factory settings and, if that doesn't help, due the firmware upgrade.

I'm actually thinking a new router would be a good idea because this one is 3 years old and I could use it as a repeater/access point for reception on the porch, which is marginal.

EDIT/Update: So, I messed around with some more settings on both my router and my 6200 settings and the download speed shot back up to 43Mb/s!!! Then I noticed that in all the resetting I had neglected to set WPA security. So I did so and, ever since the download speed is at around 24 Mb/s, consistently. Certainly more than acceptable for my needs, but I've never noticed router security taking that kind of a toll on throughput. BTW, I definitely always had WPA security on that router all the years it was doing 42 Mb download speeds.

Thanks all for the coaching. Some things are destined to remain mysteries - especially in the world of computing!

 

In all situations, I would hold off on getting a new router. 802.11AC goes final in december, don't buy a Draft-ac router.

 

For my previous router, when the encryption was AES, the download speed was significantly slower than using TKIP (this was with WPA/WPA2). No idea why that was the case, but it could be related to your issue.