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jason94024Flag for United States of America

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Wifi lag when there is good signal

On my work network, when on wifi, I get good results on a speed test

30/33/ 3ms

but when playing games on the phone people complain about lag and even losing wifi connection.

I am not sure why they are getting lag or disconnection when there is a strong signal.

Any ideas?
Avatar of noci
noci

Strong signal on AP is one how strong is the signal of the phone/tablet/laptop ????

Is there a wall between equipment, is there a body of water (aquaria, etc.) nearby,
many equipment will also demand all access on the same channel so they have to wait in turn to get the message across.

You should do the speed test while all equipment is connected & active.
Avatar of jason94024

ASKER

the speed test is done on a phone on the wifi

there is no wall or body of water, it is a large room, think banquet hall size.

speed test was done with all equipment connected.


thanks
The speed test is only valid for traffic between you and the host that you are running the speed test against.    Most speed tests are setup to detect where you are and select a host that is close to you.  This allows for the lowest possible latency, which helps give you the highest possible through-put.

So unless you are running it against the same host that is also hosting the game or one that is the same location, it really does not mean a whole lot.

You can try ping'ing the host that is running the game and that will give you an idea of the latency between you and it.  Latency can affect the lag and speed.   Are the disconnects  disconnecting for the WiFi connection or are you getting disconnected just from the game server?
traceroute will also give some insight.  in the number of hops.
sometimes there are local packet loss between phone and Wifi access point. I have a FritzBox @home and 2 of my Samsung phones drop packets occasionally when connected to the fritz AP. Connected to the same W-LAN (cisco AP) there are no drops.

So you also might try to ping your phones for a longer while to see if there are any packet losses.

But this applies only if the lag is constant, always there. or Packets are frequently dropped. (in my case this happens approx. 4-6 times an hours, lasts for 1-2 seconds.
How many users are trying to use the AP?  As you increase the number of users on an AP, performance will go down due to the contention based nature of the media and this drop can be dramatic.  Additionally, if there are other radiators in the area (think microwave ovens, etc.) you could have intermittent interference to the signal.  To get around the first, you would need to add other APs (you can test it by measuring performance as you increase the number of connected users).  To get around the second, you can try moving the AP to a different location.
Along with number of users on network as Atlas asked....
Have you done a wifi analyzer?  you can download free analyzers for mobile devices that will give you a good picture of the possibility of your neighbors wifi causing conflicts. This will allow you to see what channel your system is defaulting to and you can select the opttimal channel to avoid these conflicts.

What brand/model of your phone? It depends on your phone and the game maybe the game you want to play is updating but try to install Wi-Fi AnalyzerGo to Google Playstore and download Wi-Fi analyzer to check if there are other Wi-Fi signals in your area that use the same channel as your router. If so, go to your router’s settings and change the channel it uses. For your router’s desired settings, check its user manual as each router has its own desired settings. Click this link for more information https://innov8tiv.com/fix-wifi-slow-on-phone-speed-up-wifi-on-android-phones/amp/

You said that this is a "work" network.  So is playing games allowed?  Do you have access to the networking equipment, like the AP, the firewalls, gateways, routers?  If so, you may want look at what is happening there.  

Your speed test appears to only show ~30Mpbs of up and downstream.  Depending on the number of employees and what your company does, that does not seem like a lot of bandwidth to me.  

It's possible that there are mechanisms in place to limit bandwidth for "non-approved" uses of the network.  Such as limiting bandwidth.  

Some companies may have a single WiFi infrastructure but have multiple SSID's.  One maybe setup for guests and/or non-company owed equipment like tables, personal computers, personal phones and give them access to the Internet only, no internal networks.   The bandwidth on the guest network may be limited so that it dos not consume all of the available Internet bandwidth.

Then there could be other SSID's to connect to other internal networks on company owned equipment and allow Internet access for company approved uses.
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