Often the problem is right in your own home. That’s especially true if you live in high-density housing. WiFi permits one device to broadcast at a time. If two packets overlap, they collide, and both must be retransmitted. Retransmitted packets can collide with new packets. Before you know it, you have a WiFi traffic jam, just like rush hour on the highway. It’s a bigger problem if you live in high-density housing, with all your neighbors competing for access to the WiFi. The problem is worse if you have less than a very strong Ethernet signal. Even if you see four bars on your WiFi icon, it’s possible that a neighbor’s signal is as strong or even stronger than yours.
The next factor is usually signal strength. Your WiFi 5 router supports 500 Mbps on the 5 GHz band, but that’s only true with a very strong signal. As the signal strength decreases, the speed of the WiFi link goes down. Four bars on the WiFi signal aren’t enough to get the maximum speed of your WiFi. (CHECK TO SEE IF YOUR INTERNET PROVIDER HAS WIFI 6. THIS WILL SIGNIFICANTLY IMPROVE YOUR CONNECTION SPEED.)
People tend to focus on bandwidth or internet speed. It isn’t necessarily so. Streaming video is not demanding. UHD (4K video) needs about 25 Mbps of bandwidth. If you drop down to HD (1K), the bandwidth drops to less than 10 Mbps. If your options permit, you can drop all the way down to 2 Mbps and still get a picture as good as the old analog TV broadcast. In many cases, the problem is there are too many devices competing for the WiFi channel.
To fix it, connect your TV to the router with an Ethernet cable. It’s nice to have a gigabit link to the router, but the real advantage is that no other devices are competing for that link. Each hard-wired device has its own dedicated link. As an experiment, move your equipment around so you can temporarily connect your TV to the router with a cable. If the problem goes away, you’ve found your problem.
If you don’t like that answer, you can also try selecting a lower quality video. The fact is that most people don’t perceive much difference between UHD and HD video. Even if you can see the difference, dropping from UHD to HD uses less than half the number of packets. Watching a slightly lower resolution picture is better than buffer stutter.
