Wifi Speed Fluctuating Wildly (M17 R4)

I never experienced this with my last Alienware laptop and even if I shut off the whole Killer wireless suite and go to IPv4 and turn off Killer Wireless Bandwidth Monitoring or whatever it was, my download speed fluctuates from 2.5MBps to 200KBps over and over, and it does it so consistently it seems to be predictable. As soon as I go to plug in my ethernet cable I get a solid 3MBps with no fluctuating. Any ideas?

 

Order an Intel card and throw the killer card in the garbage seems to be the most popular option. If you have already uninstalled the killer suite and it is still doing it then a different WiFi card might be your best bet.

I read so many horror stories about the killer cards I had my Intel replacement ordered before my laptop even arrived. In the short time it worked ( about 12 hours ) the WiFi seemed fine but I have the Intel card for the next one just in case.

 

Just set Roaming aggressiveness to Lowest by navigating to Device Manager > N/W Adapters > Killer WLAN, right click, hit properties and change the setting as I said.
Original credit to @judal57 for this tweak.

 

Hmm, this seemed to partially help. Instead of fluctuating as low as 200KBps, it was only going as low as 1100KBps but still continually going up and down, and only got as high as 2.5MBps where as my ethernet cable directly after on the same download was solid staying around 2.7MBps-3MBps. It seems like a no brainer that I should always use an ethernet cable now but is this normal that WiFi is that much less performance? Why did setting the roaming aggressiveness to lowest help? Is this an interference issue?

 

As the name of the chipset suggests, it kills other wifi cards at gaming by providing best paths possible so to provide this, it continuously searches for best signal across your neighbourhood, so that your online gaming experience doesn't lag or have any latency issues whatsoever. Well, its my theory. Also, Just try setting the channel preference to 2.4G or 5G depending on your router.

 

Killer Cards are crap IMHO

see this:

Just upgraded to an Intel Dual Band Wireless-AC 8265

 

For me as a matter of fact, intel had huge latency on my sis's lappie. Killer way better after a gift from @judal57.

 

If you care about latency your going to be on a hard line.

 

Latency is on point as far as my WiFi goes its just the damn fluctuating download speeds

 

Had the same problem and installed a certain previous killer driver which was suggested in a similar thread and it was fixed.

 

Oh really? Can you share?

 

It was probably the one I posted. I had opened a ticket with Killer and got this response. The driver version they suggested resolved the disconnect during large transfers issue I had. It may also resolver your issue.

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Sorry for the delay in getting back with you. We have tested many different desktops and laptops and finally been able to reproduce this issue. It does not affect all platforms, so we had to determine which platforms could reliably reproduce the issue for us. We are working with our driver developers to fix future drivers, but for the time being, we have confirmed that using an older driver version for the Killer Wireless-AC adapter resolves the issue for the time being.

Please download the INF package for driver version 12.0.0.230 here:
www.killernetworking.com/support/Killer-Wireless-AC_INF_12.0.0.230.zip

Then extract the package and install via Device Manager. If you need some guidance on how to install a driver via Device Manager, please refer to the first article this page of our knowledge base (Installing drivers without Killer feature set):
http://www.killernetworking.com/driver-downloads/knowledge-base?view=topic&id=4

Regards,
Josh