Wi-Fi speed drops when downloading torrents

Good afternoon!

I really need some help!

The gist of the question. In December was bought a laptop Asus VivoBook A512FL, running on Windows 10. At home was connected to the network wi-fi, router – Zyxel Keenetic (bought in 2012), the operator – Vodafone, speed – up to 100 mbps. Two phones, TV, set-top box are additionally connected to the network. If you use the network to watch videos, download files directly, work in the browser, no problems, everything works perfectly. But when I start torrent on my laptop, the download speed first rises up to the speed stated by the operator, but after 5-10-20-30 minutes it drops radically, most often below 1 mbps. At the same time on the laptop and on other devices of the network also drops the speed of the Internet, it is almost impossible to use. If all devices are disconnected from the network, the speed on the laptop still drops.

It feels like something cuts off the speed after reaching peak load. The problem is solved simply: if you restart the computer or disconnect and then turn on the laptop wi-fi, the speed comes back to normal, but after a few minutes it drops again. I went to the Internet for help, tried a number of instructions, nothing helped. What exactly did I do:

Disabled bluetooth;
Disabled in Windows settings everything related to background data transfer.
Installed another torrent program.
Manually lowered the download speed in the torrent program.
I reinstalled the network adapter drivers.
I checked Auto-QoS, Enable Wi-Fi Multimedia mode (WMM), changed the channel, changed the standard to 802.11n.

After none of the above helped, I decided to test the laptop at my girlfriend’s house. The devices there are almost the same, except that the router is TP-Link. Tested it, the situation is the same – the Internet works fine as long as torrent is not enabled.

If not difficult, please tell me what could be the problem? Thanks in advance for the answer!

Answer

Good day. Unfortunately I will not give you a specific solution, but I will give you some thoughts. Maybe together will be able to find out what the cause and eliminate it.

The most important point, as I believe, is that the speed after starting the torrent download drops on all devices that are connected to the Wi-Fi router. So either the router is giving up or the ISP is limiting the speed somehow. When you checked with TP-Link router, does the speed drop on all devices as well?

You didn’t specify the model of Zyxel Keenetic and TP-Link router. If they are some budget models (and your Zyxel is already 8 years old!), it’s quite possible that they just can’t keep the channel load, which is created by the torrent client. I wrote a separate article on this topic: when downloading a torrent, the Internet goes down. uTorrent and Wi-Fi router. Try using the uTorrent program, and set the same settings as I showed in this article.

Too bad this laptop doesn’t have a LAN port (or is there an adapter included?) to connect it to the router via cable and check the download speed that way. You could try downloading a torrent from another device on that network and see how that affects the speed.

Regarding your internet provider. I would still call support and ask about this problem. Maybe they do limit the speed somehow. Although, it’s unlikely. Or enable downloading via VPN. But to download torrents you need a fast VPN, and it is usually paid.