Terrible wi-fi in the evenings

[Mummer]

I joined vodafone on the Superfast 2 deal at the end of January after being with BT for several years. For the first month or so I didn't notice any difference in the wi-fi that we'd experienced with BT i.e. extremely good. However in that last couple of weeks in the evenings our devices are constantly dropping out and taking ages to load anything. Speed checker still says I'm getting over 60 mbps download speed and Vodafone did a line check and say everything is fine. They also recommended changing the channels but their recommendation has had no effect. We haven't changed or increased the number of devices we use - and it's bad everywhere in the house - even right next to the router.

Any suggestion on what I can do to resolve this - the wi-fi is not far off unusable at night?

[Yorkie0362]

Is it any better now, had same issue and seems to be a lot better at the moment.. Not sure if they changed \ fixed something and unlikely to ever admit to it if they did 🙂

[Mummer]

No unfortunately it's still really bad.  I don't know why it's suddenly gone so bad.

[Anonymous]

If you speak to support and tell them that you have WiFi issues they'll concentrate on that and potentially not look at the real issues.

If specifically, your WiFi does get worse in the evenings then that's usually going to be down to interference between your WiFi and that of your neighbours.  On 2.5GHz it's had to do much about this other than set your router to use Channel 13 which most auto-configs seem to ignore.

To check your WiFi, there are a couple of mobile apps that you can try.  The first is called WiFi Analyser and it'll show you your signal strength and you move around the house.  The second is WiFi sweet spots, which shows you how that signal strength converts into data throughput within your network!

So, homework is to check that it is actually the WiFi that is at fault

[Mummer]

Thank you for the advice Keith.

[Froggiewrench]

Your circumstances virtually identical to mine, though don't know if I can halve a problem shared.

Wifi in my home works perfectly in my home on all devices, all day, until about 5pm, then constantly drops out and fails to work even at all for parts of the evening. Devices affected are my smartphone, a Hudl2 tablet and an LG smart TV.

Action taken: using the Vodafone broadband app, I "split" the wifi into 2.4 and 5.0 GHZ bands, then enabled tablet and LG TV to connect to the 5.0GHZ band on the router. Applying the supposed received wisdom, I was trying to secure fast Wifi over a very short distance (5.0GHZ). The reality is that the post 5pm dropout still very much happens in spite of this experiment.

The router involved is Vodafone's new "Gigafast" enabled rectangular one. My desktop is plugged directly into it, such that it delivers a constantly reliable Ethernet speed of around 70MBS. The issue, like yours, is only about wifi-enabled devices dropping out later in the day.

My next course of action is to reconnect the previous router - the one with the giant red neon light that shows it's working - with which I rarely if ever encountered wifi dropout, nor for that matter any connectivity issues at all over the 2 years I was using it until January this year. 

These experiments take time to monitor, but I will report back here if it helps.

[Mummer]

That would be very useful thank you. I'm perplexed as to why it was fine for the first few weeks and then suddenly changed.

[eveningstreamer]

i would suggest its nothing to do with your wifi - if you plug a pc via ethernet you will see the speed drop during the evening period. There very little you can do about it