Extremely slow Wi-Fi speed on new rig using a PCI Card (TP-Link TL-WN851ND)

luiscmartins · Aug 23, 2017

Hello everyone!

I just built my first PC and everything is going great except for Wi-Fi, which has been a disaster that needs to be fixed.
The card I'm using is the one on the title: http://www.tp-link.com/us/products/details/cat-5519_TL-WN851ND.html
Despite the advertised speed of 300Mbps, I seem to get at best 4Mbps, even when I am the only one in the house using Wi-Fi.
On top of that, this PCI card seems to be cutting down Wi-Fi for everybody in the house: just a while ago my father came to my room and asked me if I had been messing with Wi-Fi because his internet was extremely slow. I immediately thought it couldn't be my fault as at the time I was updating Steam at a maximum download speed of 2Mbps (checked in Task Manager) and our ISP provides a speed of 100Mbps. I went to his computer and his speed was at 400Kbps. Came back to my room, disabled Wi-Fi on my computer, went back to his computer and his speed shot up to 40Mbps. This definitely confirms to me that there is a problem with my card.

Also, the green led on the back of the card that indicates existence of signal has never been ON. I have the latest driver, despite the most recent one being 6 years old on TP-Link's official website...
Reviews for this card seem to be mixed: some people say it's great and others have similar problems to mine.
What I want to know is if there is a way to improve this piece of hardware, and if not, what reliable network options are there available for me (excluding ethernet as my router is a floor below).

Other information:
Mobo: MSI B350 PC Mate
OS: Windows 10 64-bit

RogueWatchmen · Aug 23, 2017

Have you tried testing your signal quality or ran a packet capture using Wireshark? I see this card works on 2.4Ghz which is a older technology and tends to have a lot of interference because of everything competing on the same frequency. It's not an uncommon problem if you live close to other people in the neighborhood and sometimes 1 device can make the difference. The easiest option would be to log into the wifi or modem if you have a combo unit and have it run a spectrum test. 2.4 has 11 sub-channels and it could find one that's less crowded. The better option is to move to a 5Ghz but this model does not support it. There are a lot of things that run on 2.4, cordless phones, other WiFi, Bluetooth, and each connected device consumes more and more space on a limited spectrum

The other option is the card is defective and quite possibly spitting out noise onto your families network. Most network traffic is nice and orderly, but every so often you get a bad cable, defective equipment, even a WiFi transmitter that's to powerful and overriding others. Wireshark can help with this, sometimes the amount of traffic a defective item kicks out just bogs everything down like your dad's laptop. Get some more data or logs and you can get a better idea of the problem

Those are my 2 guesses though, 2.4 is being over used and congested or the WNIC is defective. Download Wireshark to check the packets and or Pingplotter for some other test. Both are well supported so there are resources there.

https://www.pingplotter.com/products/free.html
https://www.wireshark.org/

luiscmartins · Aug 28, 2017

RogueWatchmen :

Have you tried testing your signal quality or ran a packet capture using Wireshark? I see this card works on 2.4Ghz which is a older technology and tends to have a lot of interference because of everything competing on the same frequency. It's not an uncommon problem if you live close to other people in the neighborhood and sometimes 1 device can make the difference. The easiest option would be to log into the wifi or modem if you have a combo unit and have it run a spectrum test. 2.4 has 11 sub-channels and it could find one that's less crowded. The better option is to move to a 5Ghz but this model does not support it. There are a lot of things that run on 2.4, cordless phones, other WiFi, Bluetooth, and each connected device consumes more and more space on a limited spectrum

The other option is the card is defective and quite possibly spitting out noise onto your families network. Most network traffic is nice and orderly, but every so often you get a bad cable, defective equipment, even a WiFi transmitter that's to powerful and overriding others. Wireshark can help with this, sometimes the amount of traffic a defective item kicks out just bogs everything down like your dad's laptop. Get some more data or logs and you can get a better idea of the problem

Those are my 2 guesses though, 2.4 is being over used and congested or the WNIC is defective. Download Wireshark to check the packets and or Pingplotter for some other test. Both are well supported so there are resources there.

https://www.pingplotter.com/products/free.html
https://www.wireshark.org/

Thanks for the response.
That recommended software seemed to be unnecessarily complicated to learn for the problem I was having.
I bought a pair of powerlines and that solved the issue.

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