Ping/latency

[RizzoTheRat]

Trying to stream video yesterday was really flakey and kept buffering. Speedtest on my phone reckoned I was getting 300+ Mbps but with really high ping (in to seconds in some instances while downloading!), and even the idle ping was several hundred milliseconds.

Rebooting the router seems to have solved it for now, but I find it suspicious that the problem occurred the day I'd moved my NAS from the lounge to the utilities cupboard and plugged it in to a different network port.

Is anyone able to explain in terms a reasonably IT literate person who doesn't know much about networking would understand, what causes this latency and if me rearranging the network a bit contributed to it.

My setup is a cable modem/router with 4 ports, 3 go to TP-Link Deco access points, the 4th goes to a 4 port switch which had the TV and NAS connected to it. I moved the NAS to hang it off the second port of one of the Decos instead of the switch, but haven't taken the switch out yet..

[SteveKTMer]

If the NAS is streaming or downloading or running a backup or anything network intensive and you're connecting to that using WiFi too, the little CPU in those things might be over loaded so wifi performance suffers.

If you unplug the NAS does it go back to normal ?

[RizzoTheRat]

Sorry, I should have been clearer. It was streaming from the internet that had got flakey, not from the NAS. At least I think it was from internet. Our cable provider gives us the ability to "record" stuff and watch it via thier app on a tablet, but I believe it effectively streams it from thier servers rather than from our set top box as we can still access it when out of the house. The TV buffered a couple of times as well watching something that had been "recorded" and that's playing directly from the STB. I think its the STB that's connected to ethernet not the TV but I'll check that tonight.

The NAS is connected via ethernet but computer, laptop nd tablet we were watching something on are all connected via wifi. I guess it's possible a laptop was backing up some files to the network over the wifi at the time, that's one to check if it does it again.

I did try unplugging the NAS from the switch, and initially thought it had made a difference, from just looking at the Speedtest results, but streaming was still buffering and another speedtest showed high ping times again so I'm assuming it's inconsistent.