Ping Drops Suddenly for Seemingly no Reason?

Support Network
1

I have an archer router (The one with the 8 antennas) that gives excellent signal even 35m away (got a stunning >30mb/s down on my phone from a faraway tree), yet the signal from the room directly above it drops (according to ping) rather frequently.

There are no known metal plates or any other metal things in between it and the router, and for the most part everything is fine, but occasionally (like as in once every 3 mintues) it will just straight up drop 4 packets. (According to ping) the ping goes from about 10ms → 1300ms or just drops the packet outright leading to much frustration.

No VPNs are used and I installed the desktop with a PCIe antenna.

How can I resolve this issue?

Here are the hardware specs from inxi:

System:    Host: SunriseDragon Kernel: 5.8.1-3-MANJARO x86_64 bits: 64 compiler: N/A 
           Desktop: KDE Plasma 5.19.4 Distro: Manjaro Linux 
Machine:   Type: Desktop Mobo: Micro-Star model: B450M PRO-M2 MAX (MS-7B84) v: 2.0 
           serial: <superuser/root required> UEFI: American Megatrends v: A.60 date: 04/20/2020 
CPU:       Topology: 6-Core model: AMD Ryzen 5 3600 bits: 64 type: MT MCP arch: Zen 2 L2 cache: 3072 KiB 
           flags: avx avx2 lm nx pae sse sse2 sse3 sse4_1 sse4_2 sse4a ssse3 svm bogomips: 86433 
           Speed: 2592 MHz min/max: 2200/3600 MHz Core speeds (MHz): 1: 2592 2: 2063 3: 2002 4: 1939 
           5: 2199 6: 2533 7: 1996 8: 1914 9: 3009 10: 2197 11: 2191 12: 2469 
Graphics:  Device-1: AMD Ellesmere [Radeon RX 470/480/570/570X/580/580X/590] vendor: ASRock driver: amdgpu 
           v: kernel bus ID: 29:00.0 
           Display: x11 server: X.Org 1.20.8 driver: amdgpu FAILED: ati unloaded: modesetting resolution: 
           1: 1920x1080~75Hz 2: 1920x1080~75Hz 3: 1920x1080~75Hz 
           OpenGL: renderer: Radeon RX 570 Series (POLARIS10 DRM 3.38.0 5.8.1-3-MANJARO LLVM 10.0.1) 
           v: 4.6 Mesa 20.1.5 direct render: Yes 
Audio:     Device-1: AMD Ellesmere HDMI Audio [Radeon RX 470/480 / 570/580/590] vendor: ASRock 
           driver: snd_hda_intel v: kernel bus ID: 29:00.1 
           Device-2: AMD Starship/Matisse HD Audio vendor: Micro-Star MSI driver: snd_hda_intel v: kernel 
           bus ID: 2b:00.4 
           Sound Server: ALSA v: k5.8.1-3-MANJARO 
Network:   Device-1: Realtek RTL8111/8168/8411 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet vendor: Micro-Star MSI 
           driver: r8169 v: kernel port: f000 bus ID: 25:00.0 
           IF: enp37s0 state: down mac: 2c:f0:5d:59:be:f9 
           Device-2: Qualcomm Atheros AR9462 Wireless Network Adapter vendor: Foxconn driver: ath9k 
           v: kernel port: f000 bus ID: 27:00.0 
           IF: wlp39s0 state: up mac: 08:3e:8e:07:67:01 
Drives:    Local Storage: total: 465.76 GiB used: 225.11 GiB (48.3%) 
           ID-1: /dev/sda vendor: Samsung model: SSD 860 EVO 500GB size: 465.76 GiB 
Partition: ID-1: / size: 456.66 GiB used: 225.11 GiB (49.3%) fs: btrfs dev: /dev/sda2 
           ID-2: /home size: 456.66 GiB used: 225.11 GiB (49.3%) fs: btrfs dev: /dev/sda2 
Swap:      ID-1: swap-1 type: partition size: 8.80 GiB used: 0 KiB (0.0%) dev: /dev/sda3 
Sensors:   System Temperatures: cpu: 59.0 C mobo: N/A gpu: amdgpu temp: 59 C 
           Fan Speeds (RPM): N/A 
Info:      Processes: 315 Uptime: 2h 55m Memory: 7.78 GiB used: 2.37 GiB (30.5%) Init: systemd Compilers: 
           gcc: 10.1.0 Packages: 1340 Shell: Bash v: 5.0.18 inxi: 3.1.05
2

Can you re-orientate some/all of the antennas to fire some coverage directly upwards? if you have multiple antennas they should be perpendicular to each other.

3

Do you get any issues with any other wireless devices in the same room? Such as your phone or a laptop?

https://www.reddit.com/r/HomeNetworking/

This reddit page can probably significantly help you better on this, if it is a wifi + wall / floor issues.

4

If you have an Android phone, download an app called “wifi analyzer”, it’s great for scanning and detecting congestion. It will also help you find a better channel. Try switching your router to use the 5ghz bandwidth. 2.4ghz is shared by too many devices these days.

TBH though, the loss of 4 packets in 3 minutes is nothing to be concerned about.

5

I love this app so much, I use it a lot on my Android phone. Too bad it got banned from the iOS store; had too many permissions that iOS doesn’t allow for their apps.

6

I’ve banned IOS devices from my home, ever since they started hosting all my user data on China servers and banning all VPN apps from their store. I really hope “Epic Games” wins their lawsuit(s) and puts an end to these app store monopolies.

7

They’re always in a row though, causing significant lag for about 10 seconds.

8

To quickly rule out any other device connected to the same wifi, change your password, run your test, and change back again. If you continue to have the problem, you can try changing the band (2.4 vs 5) and the channel. Failing that, it’s probably the antenna.

9

Was my conclusion as well.

I’ll try to get a new antenna. Maybe it just doesn’t work that well in it’s current location or has a manufacturing defect.