As an IT Manager or Director, you’d probably expect a Wi-Fi failure to look catastrophically obvious. Like sirens wailing and offline-related casualties strewn throughout the office.

But most Wi-Fi failures don’t look like failures. Office Wi-Fi problems in London can really fly under the radar.

Access points? Online
Internet connection – Fast
No major outages on monitoring tools

And yet, your Teams calls drop, Zoom freezes and perhaps most importantly – Staff are complaining about slow Wi-Fi on a daily basis. What is going on?

It’s at this point most of our clients contact us for help. Persistent Wi-Fi problems when the obvious vital signs look okay are one of the most common reasons organisations in London contact Geekabit for a Wi-Fi survey or investigation into the cause of the problem.

“What is wrong with my office Wi-Fi? Everything Looks Fine!”

When your colleagues or staff members are constantly complaining about the office Wi-Fi it’s no fun for IT Managers at all. Especially when the IT Team are seeing:

Strong signal strength
Healthy internet bandwidth
No hardware faults
No ISP issues

On the surface, everything looks like the Wi-Fi should be performing well. But in reality, you’ve got users experiencing:

Poor Microsoft Teams calls
Random disconnects
Slow Wi-Fi roaming between areas
Applications pausing unexpectedly
Complaints concentrated in specific locations

So what is actually going on in these woeful Wi-Fi scenarios?

Five Hidden Causes of Poor Office Wi-Fi

1. Too Many Devices Sharing Airtime

Modern London offices tend to have:

Users with multiple devices all connected to the office Wi-Fi including Laptops, Smartphones and Tablets
Meeting room systems
Wireless displays
IoT devices

Imagine all of these devices and systems all trying to connect to the office Wi-Fi at the same time. The problem is often contention rather than coverage. Hence why the Wi-Fi monitoring systems and the user experience can differ so much.

2. Co-Channel Interference

Many busy London offices and modern office buildings accidentally create their own interference.

Typical causes of Wi-Fi interference in office environments include:

Too many access points
Poor channel planning
Legacy configurations
Neighbouring office networks

3. Office Roaming

In many office environments, users can be constantly on the move. Replying to emails whilst making a coffee. Checking files on the network from meetings. Roaming from floor to floor meeting with colleagues. Connecting to a Teams meeting on your way back to your desk.

Wi-Fi problems like Teams calls dropping whilst roaming can be due to:

Devices sticking to distant APs instead of moving with the user and connecting to the nearest
Poor handoffs between floors

4. Meeting Room Wi-Fi Congestion

One meeting room can generate more demand than an entire office area. Now imagine multiple meeting rooms all trying to function at the same time.

Common symptoms of meeting room Wi-Fi congestion can be:

Teams issues
Wireless presentation failures
Slow guest access

5. The Building Itself

Many of our clients are London-based. Offices in the capital often have specific challenges to overcome when it comes to identifying hidden causes of Wi-Fi problems at work.

London offices tend to consist of many potential network disruptors, including:

Multi-floor buildings
Dense neighbouring Wi-Fi networks
Glass partitions
Concrete cores
Users who hot-desk (and flexible working)
High user density in relatively small spaces

The signal bars on your monitoring systems aren’t telling IT Managers the whole story.

Why Speed Tests Often Mislead

As an IT Manager, you might look at a speed test and see that internet speeds are good, so assume all must be well with the Wi-Fi. Unfortunately, internet speed tests can often mislead people into thinking there isn’t a problem. Here are a few reasons why Wi-Fi speed tests don’t show the whole picture.

Internet speed ≠ Wi-Fi Performance

You might also be asking why is my internet speed, but my Wi-Fi still slow? It’s because the internet speed shown in a speed test is only the capacity of the wired connection – That is the speed of the internet coming into your office via fibre or cable. The Wi-Fi performance depends on what happens to the internet after it enters your office and goes through your router – How the Wi-Fi performs depends on the local, wireless distribution of that initial speed.

So the speed might look fine, but how the wireless signal is distributed could be affected by:

Physical interference (e.g. building materials)
The distance the signal is travelling (are there enough AP’s and are they deployed in the right places?)
Hardware limitations (is the hardware up to date and still in good working order?)
Having to share with lots of other devices (which might be older and slower)

These things can all degrade the speed that is delivered to your devices. Your network is only as fast as your slowest link, regardless of the speed coming into your building.

“Why am I not getting the 1Gb connection I pay for?”

You may be paying for 1Gb internet, but that may not be translating into user experience.

This goes back to what we said above – Your network is only as fast as your slowest link. So you might well be getting 1Gb internet speeds into your building, but what is happening after the wireless signal is distributed by your router?

There is little point in paying for 1Gb internet speeds if you don’t have the hardware capabilities to match it. It’s important that your router and AP’s have the capabilities to effectively transmit that Wi-Fi signal and speed. Older phones, laptops, tablets and other devices that use older wireless standards are also going to cap your maximum speed lower than what you’re paying for.

What matters more than raw bandwidth when it comes to internet speeds?

Whilst bandwidth is important, there are other factors at play when it comes to how fast an internet connection feels.

Bandwidth is the capacity to move a high volume of data. How fast and responsively that data is delivered is influenced by:

Latency
Airtime
Roaming

There are many interactive applications that only need a little bandwidth, but demand instant, unhindered transmission in order to feel fast.

How Can Wi-Fi Speed Problems Be Investigated?

Here at Geekabit, our expert Wi-Fi engineers have a number of tools at their disposal in order to help investigate Wi-Fi problems and identify solutions.

Spectrum Analysis for Wi-Fi

Wi-Fi spectrum analysis is the process of scanning and visualizing the invisible radio frequencies (RF) used by your wireless network. It helps network administrators, IT Managers and our expert Wi-Fi engineers to identify, locate, and mitigate interference from both Wi-Fi and non-Wi-Fi devices. This allows us to optimize network channels and improve speeds.

Why might spectrum analysis be necessary? The frequency bands used by Wi-Fi (2.4 GHz, 5 GHz, and 6 GHz) are unlicensed, meaning anyone can transmit signals there. While standard network scanners only see other routers, a spectrum analyzer sees all the energy in the air. This can then help inform decisions about Wi-Fi deployment in order to minimise interference.

Wi-Fi Client Behaviour Analysis

Wi-Fi client behaviour analysis evaluates how connected devices (clients) interact with a wireless network or how people move through a physical space using their devices.

It can be split into two main categories: Business Analytics (consumer tracking, i.e. seeing how a customer moves through a retail space) and Network Troubleshooting (looking at the technical performance in a workspace).

Network troubleshooting is going to be most helpful in an office environment, enabling Network Administrators and IT Managers to understand device performance throughout the office, identify problem areas and thus improve network health and performance.

Client Behaviour Analysis in Network Troubleshooting would likely look at:

Roaming behaviour – How are devices transitioning between Access Points? Are there any ‘sticky’ clients that refuse to disconnect from weak, distant AP’s? Are there any dead spots?
Device capabilities – Are there any legacy devices that are slowing things down? Which clients support modern protocols (which Wi-Fi standard or frequency band are they utilising?)

Professional Wi-Fi Site Surveys

Wi-Fi Site Surveys are a key tool in analysing the performance of your network, helping to diagnose your Wi-Fi problems as well as measure our success fixing your Wi-Fi issues.

A Wi-Fi site survey is the most effective way to design, troubleshoot, or optimise a wireless network for homes, offices, warehouses, schools, and commercial environments.

Our expert Wi-Fi engineers work out of London, Hampshire and Cardiff. An on-site survey always provides the most accurate results, however for circumstances where this is not possible, we also offer predictive Wi-Fi site surveys using industry-standard modelling software.

You can find out more about our Wi-Fi Site Surveys here.

Wi-Fi Capacity Planning

Analysing the Wi-Fi Site Survey, spectrum and client behaviour mean that our expert Wi-Fi engineers can effectively plan for your Wi-Fi capacity, making sure your wireless network fits your bespoke office needs.

Wi-Fi capacity planning is the process of designing a wireless network to support the concurrent demands of users, devices, and applications, rather than just ensuring basic signal reach. It calculates the network’s ability to handle traffic without congestion, ensuring seamless performance even during peak usage.

A robust capacity plan goes beyond simple coverage and translates real-world traffic demands into specific hardware and configuration requirements.

“Why does my office Wi-Fi look fine but still feel slow?”

In conclusion, the biggest Wi-Fi problems are often invisible.

If users in your office or workspace are complaining about slow Wi-Fi despite healthy-looking dashboards, the issue may not be with your internet connection, access points or ISP.

As we’ve outlined above, it may be the way the wireless environment behaves in the real world. And this can be affected by various factors.

If you have tried everything you can think of to improve your slow office Wi-Fi but things still aren’t improving, then call in the experts. Geekabit helps organisations across Central London, Canary Wharf and the City identify and solve complex Wi-Fi problems through professional site surveys, troubleshooting and wireless network optimisation. Get in touch with our friendly team today.

You want smooth streaming when you’re binge-watching your favourite show. You want seamless gaming when you’re online with your friends. You want stress-free browsing when you’re shopping online between tasks. Jitter can cause interruptions to all of these things, causing a lot of frustration.

What is Jitter and how does it affect my connection?

Jitter in the technical sense refers to the variation, inconsistency, or fluctuation in the timing of signals in electronics or data packets in networking. The result of Jitter? You’ll often experience:

A lag
Choppy audio
Interrupted video
Image distortion.

Network issues can cause data packets to arrive at irregular intervals. These varied delays between received packets can cause problems when the expectation is for them to travel and arrive at evenly distributed times.

Imagine voice packets are being transmitted every 10 milliseconds. You would also expect them to be received at 10ms intervals. If network problems mean that some packets are arriving after 20ms and other after 40ms, or even some packets not arriving at all, the variation and delay in receiving the packets is what we know as Jitter.

How do I reduce Jitter?

Contributing factors that can cause Jitter in a network are:

Network congestion
Faulty queuing
Configuration errors

Mitigating Jitter for a LAN (Local Area Network)

Jitter can be kept to a minimum if a LAN is well planned and well designed. Factors to consider are:

Ensuring there is enough bandwidth and good physical network connections throughout the network helps reduce potential network Jitter.
Congestion in a network can be monitored with network health tools to identify areas of poor network design, ensuring that changes can be made to avoid Jitter long term.
Setting alert thresholds to warn of possible congestion on a link would allow an administrator to tackle the issue before it has a serious impact on end users. If link utilization is 80% or over, this is a good indication that a high level of Jitter exists.
Buffers can be used to alleviate jitter but they are not a long-term solution. A buffer will collect and delay incoming packets, correct any out-of-sequence errors and will forward them at evenly spaced time intervals. By implementing quality of service (QoS), buffers can be used to manage VoIP traffic or other high-priority packets which when identified are immediately processed and sent out.
In situations where there is significant jitter, instead of creating delays in the buffer, it may be better to drop packets or create a fixed buffer size. If buffers are full they will be unable to contain all arriving packets.

Mitigating Jitter for a WAN (Wide Area Network)

WAN networks can experience significant jitter, especially when traffic has multiple paths and hops to a destination, or when load balancing through two comparable paths. However, there are several countermeasures that can be adopted to minimize these effects:

Implement QoS via a service provider as part of a managed service.
Utilize MPLS circuits. MPLS minimizes the effects of jitter by providing guaranteed QoS.
Use WAN virtualization – WAN virtualization tackles congestion-based jitter as it occurs by measuring one-way latency across all paths and will migrate data onto another path if it detects significant jitter.

What is an acceptable level of Jitter in a network?

As much as we would love to eliminate Jitter altogether, it’s unlikely that a network will experience zero Jitter. The good news is that even though we can’t eliminate it, we CAN manage it. So with this in mind, if you’re a network administrator, here’s how you can determine an acceptable level of Jitter for your network, and how to keep an eye on particular services that may be more sensitive to Jitter issues.

Jitter and the effects on voice

High quality voice traffic is really important for every network administrator. There are unfortunately many factors that can affect voice quality, and one of the most common metrics to measure it is Jitter and latency.

Voice quality can be affected by network congestion and/or slow internet speeds, resulting in voice packets being received in a different order to how they were sent, or being dropped altogether.

Any Jitter in excess of 40ms can cause severe degradation in the quality of a call. Cisco’s Enterprise QoS Solution Reference Network Design Guide suggests the following guidelines for voice:

Delay (one-way): 150ms or less
Jitter: 30ms or less
Loss: 1% or less

How does Jitter affect Video?

Jitter can have a big impact on gameplay and streaming, hindering user experience quite significantly. A general rule of thumb is to ideally keep jitter for video between 30-50 ms.

For interactive video streams, Jitter should not exceed 30ms. On video streaming platforms (Netflix, NowTV, Amazon Prime, etc) Jitter is better tolerated because video streaming is unidirectional and when using a large buffer more data can be cached. Videoconferencing is more complicated as it utilizes bidirectional streaming. Real-time conferencing and high bitrate video can encounter noticeable issues when jitter is present within a network.

Users will notice the effects of Jitter through frozen or jerky video.

What is the most common cause of Jitter?

The most common cause of Jitter is network congestion at an exit point within a network. This could be via:

A switch
A router
A firewall interface

Most issues will be mitigated by Jitter buffers. However, excessive Jitter will cause these buffers to overflow which results in data packets being lost. On the flip side, if the buffer size is too large it can cause excessive latency on the network. It’s a fine balance!

Managing Jitter on Your Network

Jitter – the variation in data packet arrival times – is an inherent challenge in networking that can severely degrade the quality of real-time applications, resulting in frustrating user experiences like lag, choppy audio or interrupted video.

Whilst eliminating Jitter is nearly impossible, it is entirely manageable for network administrators.

Ultimately, successful management hinges on maintaining a fine balance with Jitter buffers to correct out-of-sequence errors, without introducing latency issues into the mix.

By following industry guidelines, for example keeping Jitter for voice traffic at 30ms or less, network administrators can ensure a reliable and seamless user experience.

“Why is my office Wi-Fi slow when internet speed tests are fine?”