Video stalls in the evening but everything is fine in the morning. Once your connection starts misbehaving it eats away at the whole day.
Search around and you will find no shortage of “make it blazing fast” settings. The trouble is that a good number of them mattered a decade ago and do nothing on a modern computer or router. The things that do work, meanwhile, are fairly predictable.
So here is the split: what actually helps, and what probably will not. Before changing anything obscure, it pays to work through this in order.
First, find out where it is slow
This is the part that matters most. Your connection is a chain of segments running from your desk to the wider internet, and if any one of them is narrow, widening the others changes nothing. Opening the tap fully does not help when the hose is pinched halfway along.
The quickest way to narrow it down is to try your phone on mobile data with Wi-Fi switched off. Fast that way means the problem is inside your home; still slow means it is the line or beyond. If you have a computer you can plug in, comparing wired against wireless tells you much the same thing.
These usually fix it (most effective first)
1. Move to the 5GHz Wi-Fi band
Routers broadcast on 2.4GHz and 5GHz, often as two network names ending in -G and -A, or with “5G” in the name. 2.4GHz shares its space with microwaves, Bluetooth and every neighbouring network, and congestion there shows up directly as slowness. 5GHz is far emptier and faster.
The catch is that 5GHz does not pass through walls well, so it can be worse in a distant room. 5GHz nearby, 2.4GHz far away is the practical arrangement.
2. Move the router
Unglamorous, and it works. On the floor, behind the television, inside a metal cabinet, next to a fish tank — all bad. Putting it somewhere central and a little above furniture height can visibly change how well it reaches.
3. Use a cable
Anything that does not move — a desktop, a television, a console — is best wired. It removes the entire question of Wi-Fi reliability.
4. Switch to IPoE — the fix for “slow only at night” in Japan
This section is specific to Japan. On FLET’S-based lines, the long-standing PPPoE delivery method passes through equipment with limited capacity, and that equipment congests during the hours everyone is online. It has nothing to do with the speed on your contract.
Switching to IPoE — sold as “v6 plus”, “transix” or “OCN Virtual Connect” depending on the provider — bypasses that bottleneck and commonly clears up the evening slowdown. It has to be requested, and it needs a compatible router. Most providers offer it at no extra cost, so it is worth checking your account page.
5. Restart the router, and update its firmware
Last, the dullest and sometimes the most effective. Routers run untouched for months and degrade quietly. Unplug it, wait thirty seconds, plug it back in — that really does fix things. While you are in its settings, apply any firmware update on offer.
Often recommended, but probably not doing anything
These come up constantly in search results and mostly do nothing on current systems. None of them is harmful, so try them if you like — but do not read “it did not help” as a failure on your part. They were never going to.
| Common advice | What is actually true |
|---|---|
| Hand-tune the MTU | An ADSL and PPPoE era concern. It is negotiated automatically now, and a wrong MTU shows up as “one particular site will not load”, not as general slowness. It is not a speed setting. |
| Edit the Windows registry to widen the receive window | Windows has auto-tuned this since Vista. Overriding it by hand gains nothing and can make things worse. |
| Change DNS to 8.8.8.8 or similar | Sometimes worthwhile, but what improves is name resolution — the moment before a page starts loading. Throughput does not change. It will not stop video buffering. |
| Clear the browser cache | The cache exists so things do not have to be fetched twice; clearing it makes the next visit slower. It is a fix for pages rendering oddly, not for speed. |
| Buy Cat7 or Cat8 cable | On a 1Gbps line Cat6 is already at the limit. A higher category does not move the ceiling. |
| Boosters and “speed up your line” software | A repeater extends coverage; it cannot exceed the speed arriving at it. Software that cannot explain what it changes is best avoided. |
Measure, so you know
After changing something, measure before and after under the same conditions. Numbers move with the time of day alone, so if the evening is your problem, test in the evening, from the same spot, on the same machine.
To see how your connection currently looks from outside, this site has an IP address check — it also tells you whether you are now arriving over IPv6. For where a domain points, or why mail is not arriving, there is DNS lookup. Neither needs an account.
A slow connection drains a day all by itself. Before anything complicated: the Wi-Fi band, then where the router sits, then IPoE. That order gets you there fastest.
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