Help - our S8 wifi kills our home network!

[AzfromOz]

Hi,

My wife and I recently purchased s8s. We love the phone but have a major problem with wifi: whenever we turn it on our home network slows to a crawl. We literally need to wait minutes for a single web page to load on our phones, our PC, any other mobile devices, our smart TVs, etc. Netflix is unwatchable if our phones' wifi is turned on. We turn the wifi off, and our network goes back to normal speed. We are also able to access data on our phone at a faster speed using the normal 4g network than our wifi. While a simple answer might be to leave the wifi off, our phones aren't on an unlimited data plan, so turning wifi off eats into our plan's data allowance and is not really an option (at the moment if any of us are using other devices we need to turn our phones' wifi off to make the other devices usable).

We have a DLink router (DSL-2890AL) that is near enough to brand new and worked without a hitch before purchasing our phones. The router runs data for our home PC, kids' tablets (x2), daughters' phone (x1), smart tv (x3) daughter's school laptop, and our two phones (only a few of which are ever in use at the same time). This amount of use shouldn't be taxing our network.

The problem occurred as soon as we bought the phones, and we spoke to Samsung as well as our mobile network provider, the store we bought the phones from and the maker of the modem. Nothing has changed and no-one has been able to point out why this is happening.

Does anyone have any idea what might be causing this issue and how we can fix it? As you can tell from my post we're not particularly IT-literate, so any help would be appreciated. We're seriously close to junking our phones and going back to our old S6s. They worked perfectly, just got discarded for a newer, shinier version.

Happy to explain further if what I've written above doesn't make sense.

Cheers

Az

 

[anon(238680)]

Welcome to the forums. First, I'll note that you have quite a few devices going for one router. Is everything on the same network? The S8 will run on 5Gz if your router has that available. I also have an S8+ that is on wifi all the time when in the house and I see no hit at all. What happens if you only have one phone on? Have you tried each phone by itself? You also might install a wifi analyzer on each phone, I use Wifi Analzer, and on a PC. That will help show what is going on with both your system and your neighbors if they are close.

 

[AzfromOz]

Hi, and thanks for your welcome and reply. Yes, I have both 5ghz and 2.4ghz available and I often try switching my phone between the two to see if it makes a difference. It doesn't. The issue also occurs if only one of our phones is on wifi. According to the blurb on the box the router should be able to handle 16 - 25 devices, and as noted, it works perfectly when the phones are off wifi. I suppose it's possible that the phones are the straw the breaks the camel's back. I will download the wifi analyzer you mention and see what it says.

Cheers

 

[edubb256]

Are you using SideSync by any chance? If so try turning off or uninstalling. I had the exact same problem with my Galaxy s6 a couple years ago. There was a thread about it back then and SideSync was definitely the culprit. I thought the bug was long fixed, but maybe not?

 

[AzfromOz]

Never heard of it, but will check. Thanks!

 

[AzfromOz]

Hi, all. Can confirm that WiFi analyzer hasn't shown any issues. The modern is spitting out data at a reasonable rate. I have the modem autoselecting the best available channel.

Sidesynch doesn't appear to be on the phone so that's not the issue either.

Surprisingly, the home WiFi worked without any problem for two days after starting this thread before reverting to type for the last few days. So no change despite the advice provided so far.

Cheers

 

[Kalvin Kerns]

Hi, all. Can confirm that WiFi analyzer hasn't shown any issues. The modern is spitting out data at a reasonable rate. I have the modem autoselecting the best available channel.

Sidesynch doesn't appear to be on the phone so that's not the issue either.

Surprisingly, the home WiFi worked without any problem for two days after starting this thread before reverting to type for the last few days. So no change despite the advice provided so far.

Cheers

Did you try forgetting your wifi connection on your S8's then reconnecting to it?

 

[doohsun]

The first thing i would try is run an update for your router check to see if there's a newer firmware on the router. Sometimes the firmware on the router don't talk to certain devices. It's quite common that's why there's always patches and updates for routers. You can also try creating a guess network and test your phone on there to see how it reacts. Last option reset your router and start from scratch. You might also have conflicting channels I would play around with the channel settings as well.

 

[ihearlivepplz]

Install a speed monitoring app and check if your phone is actually downloading anything in the background? Also, how fast is your wifi? What speed does your plan run on? Another thing you should check is if you have samsung cloud/Google Photos backup turned on and its downloading or uploading anything. I'm attaching a like for a speed monitor, check if there is any data activity when your phones wifi is on and everything else slows down.

 

[ihearlivepplz]

https://forums.androidcentral.com/e...reate.app.internetspeedmonitor&token=mktcJ8Kp

 

[sqa4life]

Reset both phones to factory and set up as new phone.

 

[zikkun]

Hello,

I had the same problem and i fixed it.

I fixed the issue by checking the sync setting on the s8s we had at home, they both had the sync activated on google photo, so each time a video or photo is taken hell broke lose as the phones tried to upload everything into the cloud. i deactivated it and everything runs smooth now.

Bottom line check any app that might have an auto backup option(especially pictures and voluminous files) and try to remove it or activate it under certain conditions (phone plugged and screen off for an hour... at 2 am...)

Cheers

 

[Gayle Lynn]

It seems our "assistants" are very talkative and can flood a network. Google Home ? and Amazon Alexa are culprits.
Hard to believe what with 100Mbps possibly. But listening all the time and recording sound, even the tv.

Just maybe?