Yeah your wifi sucks dude. Or your area.

It’s pretty much impossible to get decent wifi in a dense urban area where there’s competing signal.

The channel has to be clear before any station can talk. So if there’s another ssid or another router on the same channel, you’re waiting for it.

More devices on the wireless (including your neighbors wireless, if you’re on the same channel) means more waiting. More waiting means slower speed.

Add to this that most AX+ gear is defaulting to 80MHz channels and avoid UNII-2 bands (for good reason), bringing us back to 3 usable, non-overlapping channels on 5GHz.

Add to that, that a lot of consumer gear defaults to a static channel. Or says “auto” but really just sticks to one channel. Xfinity routers are notorious for this.

Also, no broadcast/multicasr suppression and enabling legacy rates, also default behavior on a lot of consumer routers and sometimes even unchangeable. Legacy rates (support for circa-2000 802.11b) define the minimum speed that is allowed (usually 1Mbps), and that speed is used for all broadcast and multicast. And these get said by the device and then repeated by the router.

Now we also have smart speakers (like Sonos and Google) that use multicast to make multi-speaker groups. That destroys the wifi. Worse, if your neighbor is playing music and you’re on the same channel. It’ll destroy your wifi.

Printers and their drivers like to spam multicast too. Even if they’re wired, because its still the same network.

Old unused port forwards too. Your router will keep looking on the wire and wireless networks for the destination, using ARPs (which are broadcast traffic). If the IP is offline, it can spam the network looking for it.

If you want good wifi, find a clean channel and thoroughly understand www.wiisfi.com. It is by far the best deep dive on wireless and many of its flaws.

What it doesn’t talk about is shit mesh systems. You want a decent mesh it must be tri-band with a dedicated backhaul. Even that is gonna slow down if you’ve got multiple hops between device and gateway. Much better to wire in all the endpoints.

But if you’ve got a clear channel and good, well-configured hardware, and good placement…you can get good speeds on wireless.

But you really should still use a wire (or something like MoCA or Powerline if that’s not an option) for anything more than light browsing and streaming services (not realtime!). Wireless is prone to latency and jitter and some applications (voice/video, work VPNs, gaming) are far more sensitive to that than others.