RBR50 Intermittent bandwidth cap for PC only

[dldeuce]

I have a RBR50 Orbi network and a 185Mbps internet connection.  Occasionally, I'll see poor performance on my win10 PC on wireless, and I'll do an Inernet speed test to see that I'm capped at 10, 30, 75Mbps.  It seems random.   I'll check my phone, and I'm always getting the full bandwidth.  Sometimes, I disconnect and reconnect and I'm back to full bandwidth.  Today, I tried that, and I went from 30 to 75Mbps.  I think rebooting the router always brings me back to normal.  I rebooted today, then of course reconnected, and I'm back to normal. I'm running the latest firmware version, and I have an Intel dual band wireless card AC-7265.

Can anyone offer any explanations or advice?

[ekhalil]

I would guess that when you have bad bandwidth you would be connected to a disturbed 2.4 GHz channel. When disconnecting and reconnecting or rebooting Orbi the wireless card will always prefer 5 GHz channel and that's why things get better.

I'd do a wireless scan and select a 2.4 GHz channel that is least used by the surrounding and set it as the 2.4 GHz channel.

Do the same also for the 5 GHz channel.

[dldeuce]

Sounds plausible, but I don't understand how to do any of that.

[ekhalil]

You need to use a wifi scanning software on your computer or phone. What OS do you have on a computer or phone at home so we can recommend suitable apps?

[WRSORBI]

This may or may not be the issue but I had a similar issue that I thought was the router perfoming capping but it turned out to be my Killer Wireless Adapter Control Center that was performing 'load balancing'.  Deinstalled the Killer Control Center and issue was resolved.   

[Blanca_O]

@WRSORBI, thank you for sharing this information. This can be helpful to other users who has this issue. 

@dldeuce - Were you able to try the recommendation provided by ekhalil? 

Regards, 
Blanca 
Community Team

[dldeuce]

 So, I looked today.  I'm getting 30Mbps on the laptop.  I can see looking at the attached devices on my Orbi management page that the laptop is connected to 2.4G not 5G.  Why is it doing that?  I saw before that it was on 5G and my phone is always on 5G.  I've looked into figuring out the best 2.4G channel before, but that's going to change over time.  I would think I'd be much better off on 5G.  Why am I not getting any consistency with that?

[dldeuce]

I have Win10 and an iphone

[dldeuce]

yes, and as soon as I disconnected and reconnected from the PC, I connect back at 5G and get the full bandwidth.  You're probably on to something, now the question is why is it connecting to 2.4G?  How do I control that?

[dldeuce]

I saw in Device Manager under the advanced tab on my wireless card that there is an option for preferred band.  It was set to no p  reference.  I changed it to prefer 5G.  We'll see what happens.