Hi, I recently moved into an older apartment building and after having previously been a Virgin Media broadband user in my previous home, I found that unfortunately, their services weren't available for my new address. I looked around online for the best speeds and found out that EE offered the best speed for the best price and as an EE mobile customer, I decided to go to my local store and spoke to the team there about my dilemma. They confirmed the landline speeds for my new address would be in the 3-6mbps range, but suggested I instead opt for a new 5GEE Wifi Router as it instead used the mobile network rather than the landline and checked the speeds for my area. They said that I should expect speeds of up to 140mbps, which was higher than my previous package with Virgin Media and at a cheaper price too, which I immediately took them up on as it sounded too good to be true. Unfortunately, it seems to have been the case.
I set up my router as instructed, using my laptop to test it with as I'd not yet had time to set up my home computer. My initial speed was 72.6mbps download and 11.6mbps upload. Not exactly 140 I thought to myself, but it was still very good, so I had no problem with it. I then go to sleep for the night and wake up to find that my router turned on for about twenty seconds and then once it achieved connection with the internet, it'd turn itself back off. I called technical support at the time and after they attempted to troubleshoot my router, eventually deemed that the battery must be faulty and that I should take it back to my local store to have it fixed or replaced. I did just that and they found the same problem and were not able to fix it, so instead sent off for a replacement. Two days later, I'm informed my new router has arrived - I go to receive it and have them set it up and make sure it works in the store before I took it home. At home, it works fine, at roughly the same speeds as before until about six hours down the line at which point it turns off again and has the same problem. I go back to the store and they give me a different charger to try and it seemingly works fine from then onwards in terms of battery, albeit with a consistently blinking battery light.
Now, I finally get my home computer setup - I'm an avid PC gamer using discord, youtube, twitch, steam, etc - and to hopefully ensure I have the best connection possible, I used an ethernet cable. This, however, seemingly has been the worst decision I've made. My speed tests come out with 6.79mbps download and 3.27mbps upload at best - quite literally what I could have had on landline-based broadband. To make matters worse, I would randomly get ERR_CONNECTION_CLOSED errors on Chrome when trying to browse, found myself unable to connect to Steam at all, and when it came to Discord I found myself with 9999 ms and a packet loss rate of 100.0%. Weirdly, I could hear others relatively fine with occasional cutouts but they couldn't hear me at all, and I could join discord screen share live streams, but couldn't do it myself too. So, I googled it and found a thread on this board by @dan-giddins which seemingly perfectly described my issue, and followed his solution which worked, enabling me to use the internet again, however with the persisting low speed and a rough ping of 50-100ms.
I decided to check my speeds again on my phone and laptop - both connected via wifi - and my laptop came back with a download speed of 21.7mbps and an upload speed of 5.81mbps while my phone came back with a download speed of 23.2 and an upload speed of 4.23. I tested discord on my laptop and found I received roughly the same ping as my desktop. So, this led me to possibly think it could be something to do with my connections being on the 2.4GHz connection over the 5GHz. The only problem is that the 5GHz only appears on my phone, and not my laptop and I have no idea how to pick which it uses on my ethernet connected computer. So once again, I googled it and it led me back here, where I was unable to find an up to date solution outside of supposedly changing the level of security. So, I gave that a shot and tried every type of security on the 5GHz - even disabling security entirely for a little bit - and nothing changed, the 5GHz wouldn't appear as a network on anything outside of my phone.
Lastly, on the admin control panel, it displays my router's connection as 1-2 bars at all times, despite being against my window. I'm also not in a rural area, I'm quite literally next door to my local EE store in the middle of my town centre, so a part of me wonders if this has anything to do with my ping and connection issues.
I know I've written a lot, so to summarise or to allow people to quickly see what issues I have and what I've done to resolve them thus far;
- Power problems - router worked fine then kept turning off, continued after being replaced, was given a USB-C lightning adapter to increase power input to the router. Has patched the issue but the battery light is almost always blinking.
- Ethernet problems - unable to connect to certain online services and difficulty browsing, solved via a solution found here, however ethernet speeds are significantly lower than that of wifi when traditionally would be the other way around.
- Unable to connect to 5GHz - Only able to connect to 2.4GHz on my laptop, unsure of how to select between 2.4/5 on ethernet, can only connect to 5GHz on my mobile phone. Changing security to any options at all does not change this.
- Low connectivity - Admin control panel displays 1-2 bars despite being in the town centre and nearby local EE store. Router placed next to the window, have tried other spots, all roughly the same. Ping moderately high, or at least higher than preferred for online gaming.
I'm pretty sure that's all of my problems so far, if I'm missing any I'll reply later on if/when I encounter them again. Hope this helps others and hope I get some answers. Thank you for your time if you read this and attempt to help.
