This is very similar to an issue I battled for months on MacBook Pro (one of the later Intel versions, like 2018-ish), although there problem was not in the HW itself but the current version of MacOS at that time (this is no longer an issue).<p>I noticed that my WiFi had similar repeating lags .. about every 8-10s pings would go to a few hundred ms and then return to single/low double digits.<p>Long story short, the problem was with several MacOS components (and maybe some 3rd party software) requesting Location services to determine Mac’s position. To do that, among other things, Mac scans WiFi around you (probably for the names/SSID?) and to do that, the current WIFI connection is temporarily put on a back burner, resulting in a brief delay in traffic. The solution was to minimize location services.
>First, I purchased a new, highly-reviewed, wifi adapter on Amazon.<p>This is not how you find a high quality product on Amazon.<p>>It didn’t resolve the issue. It did, however, come with an offer for a free 64GB flash drive in exchange for a good reviews.<p>Now you know why it was so highly reviewed.
I was certain that I read about a very similar issue here in the past, and after some searching, found this exact article posted 2 years ago:<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32524702">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32524702</a>
I encourage techies to dig into their wifi hardware & software end-to-end. Install smokeping on a raspberry pi (even a $10 zero works). Ping all of your home devices , your gateway, DNS & first hops of your IP.<p>You will discover all sorts of disruptions affecting your network quality, including interference.<p>For your primary devices like desktops & laptops, use mtr (my-traceroute) in a terminal window to watch your pings over time.<p>Your connectivity issues , particularly with VC, terminal emulation & gaming, are due to ping latency , not bandwidth issues.<p>You will find software issues like this one, the location services bug on MacOS, and others; as well as hardware issues due to transmission interference, noise, physical interference.<p>Consistent & low pings are critical.
But why does querying the registry cause the WiFi to drop?<p>It smells like there is a AP search occurring, which I think usually causes the antenna to frequency hop for the duration search, which results in latency on the established connection since it can't transmit at the same time.<p>But does enumerating registry keys do that? I didn't think the registry had dynamic behavior like that.<p>Still … a ridiculous bug.
I had a similar issue!<p>Around 2017 I moved into a new house and my MacBook Pro started getting latency spikes every few minutes. Not as bad, but still noticeable. This irked me quite a bit, because I spent several weeks wiring my house with the best POE-powered WiFi access points available at that time.<p>So I spent some time debugging the issue, and it turned out that the culprit was in the location services! For some reason, the weather widget tried to check the location every few minutes, and that involved scanning for the WiFi access points. Which in turn meant that latency spike, I posted about it on StackOverflow ( <a href="https://superuser.com/questions/1142798/experiencing-high-latency-on-wifi-every-other-second-with-macos-sierra/1348295#1348295" rel="nofollow">https://superuser.com/questions/1142798/experiencing-high-la...</a> ).
This isn't even particularly close, but I had a gremlin that I would notice at night time where I'd hear my CPU fan idly spin up and the computer slow down... come to find out I was basically getting port scanned and _blasted_ with RDP requests, and since RDP is a nightmare protocol with no rate limiting to speak of, it was obvious that some botnet had found the port I had changed RDP to and was hammering it to try to gain access to my computer. This manifested with svchost.exe maxing out CPU, and digging deeper revealed it was coming from a botnet in... well, who knows where.<p>Obviously that was all the incentive I needed to finally heed my devops friend's warning and disable port forwarding and instead use Tailscale for remote access, but yeesh. Wild to watch happen first-hand.
My reaction:<p>"If scanning for wifi has that much negative impact on my connection, the OS should by default pop up a toast notification when it happens without a user request to do so."<p>If MS can put slop like news and weather and ads for apps like Candy Crush into the Windows GUI, they can also give me <i>useful</i> info like that.
At last, I know what probably was causing my Realtek WiFi problems during that era (circa 2020). It is so strange that a Ring 3 application can wreck a havoc on the networking subsystem for the whole OS. Also it is weird that Qt, being a UI library, takes a role of advanced network guardian by monitoring the activity of network interfaces. What a mess.
I have a similar issue with two M3 MBPro machines. There's a high volume of lost packets when I'm connected to my home 5GHz wifi. The 2.4 connection works just fine.<p>All the other devices don't have any problems.
> Later, (for unrelated reasons) I built an entirely new desktop computer, not using anything from the old one, except the new wifi adapter. This included a fresh install of Windows 10… A few weeks later, and the issue suddenly began happening on the new computer also<p>This pretty clearly points to some weird software you’ve got installed. It’s not hardware, and it’s not a wonky Windows installation. What else could it be?
Interesting - Anyone know if this problem affects QT5 under Linux?<p>I’ll have to do some digging to find out, but curious if anyone else has seen this on Qt.
I have a completely unrelated issue: since switching to a new iPhone, only my iPhone occasionally can't access anything on Wi-Fi.<p>All my other devices, including a MacBook and iPad connected to the same network work fine. My previous iPhone also worked just fine, it's just the new phone.<p>I know how annoying these can become, and glad to hear that you could pinpoint it down.
This is very similar to an issue I had while playing games on a wired Windows desktop. I haven’t run into it in a long time now that I think about it. I wonder what might have changed.
On a related topic. I have a really weird problem in my house where I'm about 20 feet from my TV trying to use my PS5 DualSense connected to a Google TV device connected behind the TV. It uses Bluetooth, which is also 2.4GHz, and the issue I'm having is that the dongle behind the TV is really impacting my controller connection and making playing games over PS Remote Play completely impossible. I even have the GTV device hard wired with an Ethernet adapter, as is my PS5. This can't really be a range limitation can it?
My favorite stupid wifi thing I ever had, for some value of favorite, was a previous incarnation of my home router, which apparently had a known issue where certain Intel wifi cards connecting to the AP would cause it to start having firmware crashes randomly, which I discovered when I brought home a new laptop and my wireless on every device started being unreliable...<p>Nothing to be done about it other than "don't do that" or "replace AP" since the firmware is a black box. It was...maddening.
I think some are missing the actual point here:
Why does a software/hardware/driver concerned with drawing need to know what wifi-networks are available?
That is tantamount to surveillance.
An absolute no-go.