What Can Cause a Tablets Wifi To Interfere With Other Devices Wifi Internet

Question

I have a very weird problem occurring. I just bought a Windows 8.1 Tablet from Phoenix Technologies. When the new tablet connects to the internet it kills all other devices internet and brings their speed to a crawl.

We have tested this extensively and you can see that as soon as I turn on the tablets wifi our Windows 7 laptop and our Windows 8.1 Acer Tablet download speed immediately decreases to 10kb/seconds (from 350kb/sec).

What could cause this problem and how can we fix this?

Phoenix Tablet Specs:

• Bought through Aliexpress.com; the tablet by default has windows 7 installed but the sellers install windows 8.1 over it upon request. We requested this.
• 4 Gig RAM
• Qualcomm Atheros AR9002WB-1NG Wireless Network Adapter. Recently installed latest drivers.
• BIOS version is Phoenix Technologies LTD. 81, 4/07/2012

Answer 1

Firstly, update your firmware. An outdated firmware may cause problems. Second of all check, if your DCHP is set to a max, and if your device is the "lucky" one that maxes it out. I would not recommend router replacement as it is probably not router firmware.

Answer 2

First try to confirm if it's actually traffic that's causing the issue, or something at a lower layer (like physical interference). If your router has any traffic graphs or measures, monitor those to see if there are spikes on one or any internal IP address when you turn on the tablet.

If so, you might try temporarily setting the wireless network as a metered connection (should be able to do this with Windows 8.1 in network settings). If that makes it drop off, you might have a background app that's just churning away. If you recently installed Windows 8.1, it could be downloading a bunch of its own updates too, or maybe one has failed and it keeps retrying. If it's still happening, might be time to set up some kind of packet-sniffing like with Wireshark to see where all the traffic is going and what protocol it's using, that would be a good clue. You could also use QoS (quality of service) settings in the router to throttle traffic to the tablet (assign it a static IP if it doesn't have one) so other devices aren't starved. This is more of a band-aid than a true fix.

If it's not a traffic issue, try moving the tablet far away from the laptop before you turn it on and see if it makes any difference. I guess it could be that the laptop is overly sensitive to other devices in close proximity, but that seems unlikely. Experimenting with different channels for the wireless network might also yield better results on a different frequency.