You have a fast internet connection. On paper, your connection is capable of offering speeds of 900 Mbps down and 800 Mbps up, but when you start surfing the Internet you discover to your horror that your connection is very slow. You do a speed test and everything seems normal, so you don’t understand what’s going on.
More than one of our readers may have encountered this situation on more than one occasion, and the truth is that it is, unfortunately, something that can happen more frequently than would be desirable. A fast internet connection can become a slow connectionand for very different reasons that we are going to review with you today in this article.
Fortunately, most of the problems that cause a fast Internet connection to slow down are usually easy to identify and resolve. For this article to be useful to you, we are not only going to review those problems, but also We will also give you a real solution to each of them. As always, if you end up with any questions, you can leave them in the comments.
A poorly placed router can slow down your Internet connection
And in a remarkable way, so much so that it is possible that in the most remote areas you will end up without connection. This has an explanation, and that is that the radio waves emitted by Wi-Fi have a limited scopeand can also be affected by interference and obstacles.
For this reason, a very fast connection can end up being very slow if we place the router in a very remote position, surrounded by obstacles or sources of interference. In these cases, something as simple as moving it a bit and placing it in a better position can make a huge difference. Misplacing the router is one of the most frequent mistakes.
Solution: just move the router to a slightly elevated position, less far away and free of obstacles and sources of interference.
Be careful with the Wi-Fi standard, and with the cable and the network card
In these times it is not normal to use outdated Wi-Fi standards, and neither do you have old network cards or low-performance cables, but they are three things that we must take into account because they can end up significantly affecting the performance of our Internet connection.
If you enable compatibility with Wi-Fi 3 or earlier, the speed of your Internet connection will be reduced to unacceptable levels, and if you use a network card or cable limited to 100 Mbps you will be taking advantage of only one ninth of the real speed of your connection.
Solution: Avoid using old Wi-Fi protocols and outdated components and cables, as they will reduce the performance of your Internet connection.
An intruder or malware infection can cause the fastest connection to turn into a “turtle”
Security is very important in any Internet connection, and in this sense it is essential that we continue a set of basic guidelines to avoid problems. Common sense when browsing the Internet is essential, and the use of antivirus solutions will help us avoid unpleasantness.
Suffering a malware infection can greatly affect the performance of our Internet connection, and there is even the possibility that prevent us from browsing certain web pages. On the other hand, if an intruder manages to break the security of our Wi-Fi and sneaks into our network, they could also end up consuming all of its bandwidth, which will make our connection go haywire.
Solution: be careful when browsing and downloading things, install security software and antimalware protection, keep your computers and devices up to date and use a strong password for your Wi-Fi network. If you discover that you have an intruder, change the password to kick him out.
High latency and server and service issues
Latency can also cause even the fastest connection in the world to become the slowest. With this term we refer to the time that passes between the completion of bidirectional communication between our PC and a server from Internet. If this is very slow, the connection will be greatly affected.
Think, for example, of what would happen if you wanted to open a web page but there is a huge latency of several seconds, such an action would take a long time to complete. Service issues with your Internet provider or the servers you are trying to connect to can also have a serious impact.
Solution: It is possible to reduce latency by minimizing the number of connected devices and applications or processes that consume bandwidth in the background, but if the problem is beyond our control, we will not be able to do anything but wait for it to be resolved.