I have a new laptop and to supply internet to it, I bought a DLink DGL-4300 router. Before the router arrived, I'll admit we were connecting to a nearby wireless network. It may have been a neighbor's, or the school's across the street. Anyway, we weren't experiencing any unusual latency.
Ever since receiving the Dlink router, setting it up, and connecting to that network, we've been experiencing intermittent spikes of extreme latency. Sometimes the internet will just hang indefinitely for 30 seconds or a minute, and sometimes it just goes very slow. We notice this most often while playing World of Warcraft, but that may be because that's what we do most often on the laptop. Now, I believe this problem originates with the router. We (my girlfriend and I) can both be logged into World of Warcraft, at the same time, on the same server, and she'll be experiencing the massive lag spikes on the laptop, while I'm experiencing nothing of the sort on the desktop PC. So I don't think the problem is our ISP, or World of Warcraft's servers. Also, the laptop never had this problem while it was connected to the other wireless network, so I believe it has to be something to do with our router and our network.
The laptop always shows excellent signal strength, even when the internet isn't moving.
I called Dlink tech support and the tech told me he was pretty sure it was interference from my cordless phone, so we unplugged it and bought a plug-in phone. Still have the problem.
I've tried various things in the network settings.. I've tried changing the channel on the router, and it hasn't made a difference. I've tried disabling WEP, and it didn't make a difference. I've tried lowering the MTU, and that didn't help either.
In case this helps you to diagnose the problem, I'll describe exactly what the latency looks like. While playing WoW, when the lag strikes, it causes actions to take a very long time.. like casting a spell will go on and on and on until it finally goes 20 seconds later. Sometimes I'll be able to run around seemingly as usual, but non-player characters in the environment will be idle and unresponsive. Sometimes, this is followed by everything speeding up for a second and rapidly catching up, but sometimes it just skips to catch up. Usually the latency bar will remain green and still show a good latency, even while this is going on. Other times, it goes red and shows 3000-9000ms latency, although oddly, this usually only comes with less extreme effects.
This problem is not exclusive to WoW, by any means. I've noticed it while browsing web pages. Sometimes they just won't load, for a minute or more.. just, nothing happening.
I'm not very knowledgable about networking. You are. Please, tell me what to do to put an end to this. There's no reason that I can see why this should be happening. I would be deeply grateful to anyone who can help me fix this. I'll try anything you suggest, or run any tests that you need me to run.
Thanks.
edit: I tried changing to a different router channel again, and so far my girlfriend says she's not experiencing any lag.. but, I'm not getting my hopes up. Sometimes it can go for a long time, hours, without any problems, and then all of a sudden, it goes haywire.
edit: The latency bar started to go yellow, and then red, though it only went to 610ms. Exiting the game and repairing the connection solved the problem for the moment, as it was back to the green when I logged back in. However, I don't want to have to do this regularly.
Edited by Nate7410, 31 January 2008 - 03:20 AM.