Signal strength drops when downloading

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pontiac4life

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Jul 25, 2012
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I'm using my desktop connected via Wi-Fi on 5GHz and I'm using a TP-Link Archer AX55 router and my Wifi card is a Fenvi Wifi 6e AX210. My ISP is Spectrum 300Mbps package.

I recently got it all set up and adjusting antennas to get the best signal quality I can get and I'm sitting at 85% right now and it's very stable. However I noticed that when I am doing a speed test or downloading a large file my signal percentage drops into the low 70%s, typically sitting at 72% until the download finishes and then it's back up to 85%.

My downloads are perfect and a little bit over 300Mbps so I'm not complaining about that at all but I'm just curious why my signal drops like it's doing

BTW.. The second that my signal strength drops I also see my link speed connection drop. For example when I'm at 85% signal it will show a link speed of 1Gbps but when it drops to 72% when downloading it shows link speed of 576Mbps
 
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Generally, that's wifi and why wired is better. Test a wired connection and you probably won't see a drop at all. If you do, then we can do some more digging.
 
nothing to worry. I would test latency while downloading at your max line rate. you may need to artificialy set a slightly lower limit on your download speeds. I believe this is called buffer bloat
 
SamirD said:
Generally, that's wifi and why wired is better. Test a wired connection and you probably won't see a drop at all. If you do, then we can do some more digging.
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I have done that already and since a wired connection is direct I can't see a signal percentage but my connection link doesn't change and I get the same download/upload speed as Wifi
 
Vengance_01 said:
nothing to worry. I would test latency while downloading at your max line rate. you may need to artificialy set a slightly lower limit on your download speeds. I believe this is called buffer bloat
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My ping on Wifi is 15ms and 8ms wired. I've never heard of buffer bloat before

In theory everything is working fine. I'm getting max bandwidth speed on Wifi that my isp provides but just really strange behavior on the signal strength and link speed when stressing out the bandwidth. I guess it's only happening to me? Nobody else's setup does this?
 
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It's likely the CPU of the router simply being too slow. When you have something going full bandwidth , the CPU can't keep up with everything else going on, so things slow down.

Was a problem I've had in the past with older routers.

I don't know much about tp-link software, but i'm sure if you found a way to check out CPU usage on the routers settings page, you'll see it spike.

Are you using any router built-in software like QOS, DDOS protection, anti-wpyware, firewall, attached storage etc.?
 
TheSlySyl said:
It's likely the CPU of the router simply being too slow. When you have something going full bandwidth , the CPU can't keep up with everything else going on, so things slow down.

Was a problem I've had in the past with older routers.

I don't know much about tp-link software, but i'm sure if you found a way to check out CPU usage on the routers settings page, you'll see it spike.

Are you using any router built-in software like QOS, DDOS protection, anti-wpyware, firewall, attached storage etc.?
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Thank you for the reply. What you said makes sense and yes inside the router settings I can see CPU and memory usage and I will be looking at that and testing that out here shortly. I am not using any built-in software as you mentioned

I'll check out the CPU usage on the router while I'm maxing out the bandwidth but wouldn't you think if the CPU on the router if it's too slow I wouldn't even be getting my speeds that I'm getting?

Unless you mean I would see my percentage drop even more while downloading if I upgraded my ISP packaging to a faster service meaning my CPU on the router is bottlenecking me somehow

EDIT: well I downloaded a large file that took quite a bit and maxed out my bandwidth but the highest I've seen the CPU on the router was 45% and typically was staying in the 30s so that can't be the issue
 
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pontiac4life said:
I have done that already and since a wired connection is direct I can't see a signal percentage but my connection link doesn't change and I get the same download/upload speed as Wifi
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So do you see the same slowdown?
 
Just tried that. Upload is perfect while downloading. Technically I'm not seeing a slowdown. Not sure if you confused about the issue or not
 
pontiac4life said:
Just tried that. Upload is perfect while downloading. Technically I'm not seeing a slowdown. Not sure if you confused about the issue or not
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Ah, just re-read and you're wondering about the signal strength. That could be a number of things since those strength meters aren't designed to be 100% accurate. If you don't see any difference in bandwidth, I wouldn't worry about it.
 
The way I'm seeing the strength percentage is by using either the Windows CMD command and using apps that read it. They are all showing the same numbers

Command "netsh wlan show interfaces"

Here is a before and during a speedtest on what I see. It went from 86% to 70% and also the link speed dropped. Both went back to normal after the speedtest was finished

1.jpg


2.png
 
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