> However, every time I can remember helping someone track down the source of their connection problems, the culprit has turned out to be their wifi.
This is not my experience. I’d estimate wifi to have been the problem only 20–40% of the time. I’ve found a poor ISP to be the problem much more commonly. And then the last few percent of cases is other miscellaneous network topology problems typically from failing wired hardware, buggy router or dying dumb switch.
(I’m excluding “too far away from the router” from my reckoning, because in such cases that’s been known to be the problem, and it feels unfair to criticise wifi for that unless you’re going to criticise ethernet cables for not being where you want them. Notwithstanding this exclusion, I have found that being near the edge of a wireless network’s reach is great at messing with both the router and computers; where I am at present, if I go a few metres further away from the router, my Surface Book’s wifi connectivity stands a decent chance of kinda breaking after a while, so that it starts losing 5–30% of packets and getting average round-trip times to the router of 150ms—which together make it very close to completely unusable—until I next restart the computer (restarting the wifi adapter isn’t enough). I haven’t determined who’s at fault, the router, the adapter, or Windows 10.)
This is not my experience. I’d estimate wifi to have been the problem only 20–40% of the time. I’ve found a poor ISP to be the problem much more commonly. And then the last few percent of cases is other miscellaneous network topology problems typically from failing wired hardware, buggy router or dying dumb switch.
(I’m excluding “too far away from the router” from my reckoning, because in such cases that’s been known to be the problem, and it feels unfair to criticise wifi for that unless you’re going to criticise ethernet cables for not being where you want them. Notwithstanding this exclusion, I have found that being near the edge of a wireless network’s reach is great at messing with both the router and computers; where I am at present, if I go a few metres further away from the router, my Surface Book’s wifi connectivity stands a decent chance of kinda breaking after a while, so that it starts losing 5–30% of packets and getting average round-trip times to the router of 150ms—which together make it very close to completely unusable—until I next restart the computer (restarting the wifi adapter isn’t enough). I haven’t determined who’s at fault, the router, the adapter, or Windows 10.)