Home Networks & Wi-Fi · How Home Internet Works · Lesson 5 of 5

Challenge: The Slow Evening Internet

Help a family find out why their internet crawls every evening.

Every evening, the same story

The Rivera family says the internet is slow every evening. Around 7 PM, videos buffer, Leo's game lags upstairs, and Dana's work calls freeze. In the morning, everything seems fine.

They pay for a 300 Mbps cable plan. A cable router combo, called a gateway, sits in a closet downstairs. Leo's game console and bedroom are upstairs at the far end of the house.

Dana asks you to help before she calls the internet company. She wants to know if the problem is the ISP, the Wi-Fi, or just too many devices at once.

Guessing won't help much here. You need numbers that show where the slowdown happens, and at what time of day.

Reading the results

You plug a laptop into the gateway with an Ethernet cable and run tests.

• Wired, 9 AM: 290 Mbps download, ping 15 ms.
• Wired, 7:30 PM: 280 Mbps download, ping 17 ms.
• Wi-Fi in Leo's room, 7:30 PM: 22 Mbps download, ping 90 ms.

The ISP delivers nearly the full plan, even in the evening.

Fixing the far room

Running a cable upstairs isn't possible right now. The gateway is also shut inside a closet, and closet doors and walls block some of the signal.

Dana wants strong Wi-Fi in Leo's room and the back of the house. She wants one network name everywhere, so phones switch on their own as people walk around.

First, she moves the gateway out of the closet onto an open shelf. That helps a little, but Leo's room is still weak.

The neighbor's turn

Next door, Sam has the opposite story. His wired tests show 300 Mbps in the morning but only 40 Mbps every evening. His ping also jumps from 15 ms to 80 ms at night.

He checked the ISP's outage page with his phone's mobile data, and it shows nothing. He has already restarted his modem and router the right way. The modem's Online light is steady.