After several months of every experiment I can think to run, and just getting noisy data left and right, I'm out of ideas and cannot make this network's behavior fit within my grasp of physics.
Some nights I can stream from my desktop rig just fine (I need 3.5kbs up). Some nights I can't even push 0.5kbs up the pipe. Some nights I start out fine, then 5PM rolls around and my stream starts dropping 60-70% frames. Some nights I have absolutely no difficulties.
Over the past few months I have controlled everything I can imagine contributing to this (most of these obviously don't change from session to session or even month to month but I figured I'd fiddle with them just to figure out what the hell), and have found no culprit.
If the speed was wildly inconsistent moment to moment I'd call it interference and be done with it, but it's not. It's more consistent than the Boston weather, in fact.
Here's what it's NOT:
- Position of the wireless adapter (Linksys USB100 on a five-foot USB extension cable to get it away from the case and the metal desk. - NOTE: Position doesn't have no effect, there's about a 50% difference in performance between the worst and best placement for the antenna.
- The metal desk.
- Channel
- Frequency
- Protocol
- Time of day (though there is a slight tendency to be worse after 5PM, for the longest time I thought Twitch was throttling me, but when I started collecting data that hypo doesn't pass statistical testing).
- Day of week (Though more of my bad days are on Fridays, see #6).
- Weather conditions (although there is a marked tendency to be worse during wet weather, correlation is not causation, all theories of mechanism here have failed tests, and perfectly sunny weather can still experience brutal outages).
- Room temperature
- Uptime of any of the hardware I control
- Whether or not the apartment above me is occupied
- Whether or not my Air Conditioner is running.
- My stream settings
Conditions: I live in a basement apartment (so the walls aren't great for radio signals), and the router is on the opposite end of the unit. My service over here sucks but when it works it's plenty good enough. I'm running Windows 10, using a Linksys USB100 on a five-foot extension cable with cradle. I have a metal desk and steel boom for my mic.
I know I'm not going to get the full 200MBs my ISP promises me. I don't need to, that's not my question.
My question is: What else could be varying this slowly, resulting in such a severe swing in up/down speeds? I go from 20MBs down/4.5kbs up to 4MBs down/0.5kbs up (right now). This is true even if I deliberately control all factors except the passing of time. What else can I test for?
