Slow Ethernet connection but faster wifi

[lucinamarie]

Hi all,
I am new to the forum and am hoping to find some instructions about how to solve the problem(s) that I am having with my internet connection.
I'm not especially impressed with our Uverse internet service, but I want to make sure that I solve all of our laptop issues before I come back at them. They spend all of their time on the phone blaming everything in my house (wood doors, lead paint, old house, a/c ducts, poor quality ethernet cables, crappy router [theirs], too many devices, etc.) except their service.
Okay, here's the problem I haven't been able to solve: if my fiance's laptop is wired in directly to the modem, he gets speeds of up to 300, I get 95 maximum. If I'm relatively near the modem, the wifi signal is above 200 (when it's stable, which isn't that often). Can someone help me figure out what I need to do to fix the ethernet connection. I have played around with as much as I understand in the network adapters, updated the drivers, reset the connection, etc. Does someone have a suggestion for me to try next? I'm a layman, but I muddle pretty well. :-)
Thanks!

[Philip]

Hello, welcome to SG. "lead paint .. a/c ducts" <-- lol wow some new ones to me.

I assume you are talking about Wi-Fi connectivity. There are many possibilities of why the issue exists, it is possible that it is your laptop Wi-Fi adapter, the router, or a combination of settings between them.

First step would be to determine if it is a wireless issue at all. It is hard to be specific without more information:
What is the maximum speed that your ISP advertises, what are you paying for?
What is the model of your modem/router/gateway?

If you have access to a client that can be connected directly via Ethernet cable to the modem/router, you can determine whether the problem is with the Wi-Fi connection, or the line your ISP provides.

Other than that, we have a number of articles on the main site about how to set your router, wireless adapter, etc. Here are a couple of them you can check
https://www.speedguide.net/articles/...imization-3449
https://www.speedguide.net/articles/...ed-tweaks-5681

[lucinamarie]

Thank you, nice to be here!

There are two things and my understanding of the hardware setup inside of the laptop is not great.
Issue #1 is the wildly changing wifi signal. We are paying for Uverse 300. I understand that with wifi, you are going to get less and when it's a steady signal, we get in the ballpark of 220. I'm good with that. The problem is that at any given moment, it bounces from 220 to 4 to 50 to 150 and back up. It's crazy the shifting. It does it on both computers, so I'm fairly certain it's the wifi signal.

Now, with Uverse, they provide the modem with a built-in router, so I don't have control over the hardware there. While they provide the equipment, they say that they are only responsible for the signal as it enter the house and they insist that it is a constant 300. They sent me a new modem/router recently, so unless the new modem has exactly the same problem as the last one, it's probably not that. The modem/router is an Arris BWG210. We live on top of the largest hill in Birmingham and it took AT&T a while to get their service into this 1970's neighborhood, so I suspect that it's just not reliable. The signal gets worse towards dinner time and much worse towards the weekends, but they keep swearing that their service doesn't work that way and so that shouldn't be happening - only, it is!

Issue #2 - definitely my laptop. When I wire in directly to the modem (or the Wireless Access Point - which I think is for the Uverse TV, but am not sure), I only get a speed of about 95. When my fiance's laptop is wired directly in, he gets the full 300 speed. I have run diagnostics and all, but nothing comes us as problematic. Is there something that I am not doing right? This is what I don't understand - is there separate hardware in the laptop for wireless and ethernet wired connections? Am I missing a setting? Some weird things got changed when my computer ran a Windows update about 10 days ago. It completely changed my video camera settings and I had to uninstall/reinstall. I muddled through that one okay after researching it on the internet. Oh yeah, the last tech guy suggested that I roll my computer back to Windows 7.

My tutoring website suggested that I run the testing on this website which is how I started my quest to fix the camera problem. It is running fine now with the exception of the Reflexive Connectivity. I don't know what this is and don't actually understand what I am reading about it when I google it. This is what it says:
"Reflexive connectivity
[ INFO ] Gathered candidate of Type: srflx Protocol: udp Address: 107.212.233.251
[ WARN ] Could not connect using reflexive candidates, likely due to the network environment/configuration."

I am afraid that I don't understand the articles you posted. I'm afraid I'm a bit too much of a layman for that type of information. :-)
Thanks for your help!
Lucina

[Philip]

Lucina,

When you say you "wire in directly to the modem), do you mean your laptop has an Ethernet adapter and you use Category 5 cable to connect to the router? Or, are you connecting wirelessly?
The wired network adapter, and wireless connectivity are different, the adapters use different drivers, have different capabilities, and will therefore have different speeds.
Wireless adapters are not all equal either, older ones cap at much lower speeds. You need a wireless adapter capable of "bonding" multiple wireless streams to get higher speeds, or/and ones that support newer wireless standards.

Also, the laptop itself may be struggling with higher speeds, because higher speed transfers become more taxing on the processor/resources. That is more true for wireless adapters.

You can always try to download and run the TCP Optimizer, set it to "optimal" and click "Apply" - this should cover all the basic speed tweaks.
It is available from here: https://www.speedguide.net/downloads.php