Help..Need to figure out whats wrong with my TPLink M4R mesh system, evry slow speeds

mav2000

mav2000

Herald
Hey guys, so all was well till last morning and since then my wifi speeds have dropped significantly to like less than 20-50kbps. I asked the ISP to come over and check the connection as we had heavy rains for a day and with his test router, the speeds are perfectly fine.

Now I have tried rebooting and have factory resetted all the 3 devices and tried all of them as the main wifi router, but I am not able to solve this issue. So tried router 1, slow speeds, router 2, rebooted, reset, setup, same issue and same with router 3. I dont think all 3 routers can go bad together, so there must be some other issue I am unable to catch. Spoke to TPlink support and they keep asking to disconnect ISP router, which I dont have. I have an ACT connection which goes directly to the M4R. Please help.
 
It is very difficult to troubleshoot wifi problems remotely since there are no many variables at play.
Still, I'll try.

1. Is your backhaul system wired or wireless? (are your mesh routers connected via wires or not)
2. What are you testing your speeds on? Have you tried another service / changed servers?
3. Are you getting full speeds with just 1 router installed instead of all 3?
4. Are you getting full speeds when directly connected to the router via ethernet?
5. Run iperf3 between 2 systems on your network (one as a server another as a client). Are speeds still slow?
 
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Hi, thanks for trying to help:

1. All are wirless
2. No full speed even on the first router, but when the ACT guy tried with his own test router it was working at full speed.

Basically there seems to be something that has happened to the router settings sometie between yesterday and today thats killed the speed. I changed around the access points to try them as the main router and still had the same issue. Even after rebbot and reset.
 
mav2000 said:
No full speed even on the first router
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Just to be clear, this is with just 1 out of 3 routers set up and working right?
Or are you still creating the whole mesh with all 3 routers but only changing the main router between them?

Oh and also try the other points I mentioned. They'll help narrow down the problem.
 
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mav2000 said:
This is just with one router out of 3 setup. Have tried all 3 indiidually, still nothing is working.
Click to expand...
I see.
Can you try these as well:

2. What are you testing your speeds on? Have you tried another service / changed servers? (fast.com, speedtest.net different servers).
4. Are you getting full speeds when directly connected to the router via ethernet? (if the router has a downlink ethernet port, ignore otherwise).
5. Run iperf3 between 2 systems on your network (one as a server another as a client). Are speeds still slow?
 
Can I run iperf between two mobiles? Dont have two computers that I can do it on.

Ran speedtest and it shows about 250 kbps download and 18-20 mbps download. I am also unable to directly connect to the router as my laptop does not have a ethernet port...never needed it,. Did wifi analyser...didnt improve anything.

There seems to be some setting I think which has gone wrong...cant figure it out.
 
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mav2000 said:
Ran speedtest and it shows about 250 kbps download and 18-20 mbps download.
Click to expand...
I think you meant 18-20mbps upload lol.

Well if that's the case, then there should be nothing wrong with your backend connection, and there probably isn't any wifi interference either.

Try these things as well:
1. Try fast.com for a speedtest.
2. See whether you have any VPN or proxies enabled on your phone. If yes, turn them off.
3. Try another phone, or restart your phone and do the speedtest again.

No need to do iperf since we can see link speeds of 18-20mbps anyway (assuming those are your normal speeds).
 
Tried different sites for speedtest. But it's not required as you can barely browse. Last test I did .1-.4 mbps. Upload is around 18-20 mbps.

Not able to connect directly to router as my laptop does not have an ethernet port.

And no third option possible, as I don't have 2 computers. Can I Do this on phones?
kage said:
I think you meant 18-20mbps upload lol.

Well if that's the case, then there should be nothing wrong with your backend connection, and there probably isn't any wifi interference either.

Try these things as well:
1. Try fast.com for a speedtest.
2. See whether you have any VPN or proxies enabled on your phone. If yes, turn them off.
3. Try another phone, or restart your phone and do the speedtest again.

No need to do iperf since we can see link speeds of 18-20mbps anyway (assuming those are your normal speeds).
Click to expand...
Bone of the phones are working on the wifi as once I turn on wifi, I can't even load a website. Tried all 3 phones at home.
 
mav2000 said:
Tried different sites for speedtest. But it's not required as you can barely browse. Last test I did .1-.4 mbps. Upload is around 18-20 mbps.

Not able to connect directly to router as my laptop does not have an ethernet port.

And no third option possible, as I don't have 2 computers. Can I Do this on phones?

Bone of the phones are working on the wifi as once I turn on wifi, I can't even load a website. Tried all 3 phones at home.
Click to expand...
I think you're responding to my earlier points.
I wrote some new ones in my latest reply. See if they help in any way.
Especially points 2 and 3 since 1 is redundant now as you said download speeds are slow everywhere.

This is a peculiar situation though, considering you have good upload speeds but slow download.
This usually means something is faulty with the ISP or your hardware.
But as you've mentioned, your ISP engineer has already checked his side of things and stuff is good on their equipment, and you've reset your personal routers too and still the situation hasn't changed.
I'm running out of options to try out lol.

EDIT: Ah I see your edit now. Well if the fault isn't in the phones as well then I'm really not sure what's up man.
Do you have a spare router you could try with?
 
Do you guys see anything wrong with these settings?


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Nothing seems out of the ordinary to me tbh.
Check these things as well if you can:

1. Have you breached the FUP on your plan? I'm not sure about ACT, but most ISPs have a 3.3TB limit on their plans after which speeds slow down drastically.
2. Does your router have an option to check download load? It might be that other devices on your network are hogging your download.

Other than this, I'm really not sure what could be wrong here mate. Perhaps someone else that comes across this has some better ideas.
 
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