My wife works from home one day a week and has had serious issues with internet speed on her work laptop. Every other device in our home has excellent speeds, it’s just her laptop that has been excruciatingly slow. She raised the issue with her IT department and they told her that a static IP address was the solution to the issue. I can’t find anything online to suggest that a static IP will help with speeds.
Is a static IP really something to look into or was IT talking out of their arse?
They’re talking out of their ass unless they have proof of something like an IP conflict / collision.
By all means try a “DHCP reservation” on your router, but it won’t make a difference to speeds unless something else is misconfigured on your network.
static IP isn’t something to look at. it’s something to rule out so you can push them into moving along and thinking of something else.
Don’t overthink it - tick the box so they can progress their script. You can argue it and you’ll probably be right, but you won’t be helping your wife get her problem solved.
Your company IT doesn’t support your home internet, so if there’s a connection issue it is easy to close the call by providing a BS solution and getting you off the phone.
This ain’t a static IP this is a problem with either the VPN or the ip conflict on thr company end
No. Dynamic versus static really has f’all nothing to do with speed.
Is your Wife using Wi-Fi or Wired ?.. does she get slow speeds on both ? (IE = have you tested on Wired if she only ever uses WiFi? )
Does she only get “slow speeds” on your home network ? (but its fast everywhere else ? (work, coffee shops, friends house ?)
Somehow you need to compare and contrast and isolate things down to whether it’s the Laptop or the network. I would lean towards thinking if everything else on your network is fast, but only her Laptop is slow,. it’s something with the Laptop.
Although I have seen situations before where a combination of “certain Laptop WiFi chipsets” and “certain WiFi Routers” (or how the Router is configured). .can lead to slowness.
Did the ass talking IT department warn your wife that once she goes back info the office that she won’t have a connection until she removes the static IP and reconfigures for DHCP?
As others have said, dynamic or static this shouldn’t have an impact on speed unless there is evidence of a conflict/collision.
I want the shit that the IT department smoked
A static IP at home won’t help.
If she is trying to hit a database over VPN, it’s going to be terrible unless you have at least 100Mbps up and down. There is a simple solution, she has to remote into a PC or remote desktop server at her office.
If she is trying to use the company phone system, bandwidth doesn’t matter. She needs consistent latency, less than 40 ms would be nice. If latency (ping) jumps around, the phone client will struggle. Your best bet there is to get a desk phone at home on a wired connection, they buffer calls better than software phones, but if your connection is jittery, no dice.
I’m assuming the laptop is not super high end and is not new. My mother’s laptop has such a shitty wifi card that it runs at just 14mbps… with a teeny tiny usb wifi dongle I was able to get it up to a max of 65mbps (limitations of the local internet network).
Basically, go to devide manager and check the internet adapter properties, specifically what IEEE 802.11 standard it can use. Find a table on wikipedia, it shows all standards and their max speeds, set your internet adapter to use the newest available standard.
If she is allowed to browse the internet on her work laptop, have her try loading different pages (or with clearning dns cache between attempts) with different configurations such as:
Clearing the dns cache would help ensure that dns not being cached gives a false positive, testing with the different configurations would help with seeing if its a wireless vs wired issue, or vpn vs without vpn issue, or none of the above.
Try wired and wireless separately (disconnect cable and try both home wifi and hotspot - disable wifi entirely and connect cable into laptop directly), make sure any VPN is off and do a speed test on Ookla.
Depending on when things go wrong, you might need to look why the VPN/(home) wifi/cable is acting up. Troubleshooting IT always starts with logical elimination of potential causes, gotta find a lead first.
If she has >40mbit (or 8mbyte) on Ookla I don’t know what you’re calling slow. Then maybe the site/server/… has issues, everything else should work.
Let me know the results, please.
If possible, connect the laptop directly to the router or modem using an ethernet cable and test the internet speed. This can help to narrow the issue - wheter it is related to wifi or the laptop itself.
Doubtful. Run a speed test on and off of VPN and compare. If it’s slower on VPN, you’ve done half their job for them. If it’s the same slow speed, then try for
driver updates.
Have they tried to have your wife run a Traceroute to the work IP address while she is on VPN? You will be able to see the latency on each hop and also see what happens with latency when the connection reaches her job. It can be compared with a Traceroute run outside of VPN to a different IP address.
Might help if you told us more about what is actually slow, and gave some of the actual symptoms or testing that was done. The static IP thing sounds fishy as an explanation.
If you do a simple speedtest from her computer and compare that to other computers on your network does it report the same speeds? If you look at the details of the speed test does it show her computer as coming from the same ISP and the same outgoing IP address as the other devices on your network?
Have you tried connecting her computer with a wire? For testing purposes you almost always should try to test from a wired connection to rule out any wireless issues.
It doesn’t hurt to give it a try but this shouldn’t change anything unless your setup is seriously misconfigured
I’m guessing here, but It sounds like her workplace and your home LAN are both using the same CIDR range, I assume 192.168. This is causing conflict / packet loss on the workplace network. If you assign her a static IP at home, they will remove that address from their DHCP scope and the problem should be solved. This is what is easiest for them at least, sounds like their network config leaves a lot to be desired. *ahem
Does she use VPN? I would assume yes, did you try to measure speed with and without it?
Static IP is BS altogether, no matter if they mean LAN one or actual public IP which is even more stupid to ask someone on the customer’s end.
At least they are giving you the time of day. I don’t. My staff doesn’t. We run a solid infrastructure with thousands of remote connections. No we aren’t going to troubleshoot your shitty apartment wifi