The Problem: The Case of The Cursed Nintendo Switch, or The Very Bad Wi-Fi Network
The Situation
For the past, eight or so months, give or take, I’ve been having a pretty shitty time when it comes to keeping my Nintendo Switch connected to the internet. I’ve tried many different trouble shooting methods to try and fix this problem for most of 2019, and unfortunately I’m in a situation where I can’t just throw money at the problem to make it go away. So it’s up to myself, and maybe some of you to help me figure out just what the fuck is going on here.
The Facts
Alright, here’s pretty much anything and everything I can think of as being relevant to “The Situation”:
I: My Internet provider is Verizon fiOS. We have the 100/100 Mbps plan. Our bill is currently past due, but it hasn’t been that way the entire time I’ve had problems with this. And I’ve made a payment arrangement to pay the remaining balance of the bill later this month. At any given time I can have a speedtest on other devices on the network roughly pull down 50 down, 50 up. Services like Steam will usually download 7MB/s. And that’s to my PC which is over Wi-Fi. Also I should note that I live in an apartment.
II: The modem/router combo we rent from Verizon is five years old. When it was installed, the genius who did the installation made the cord so short that the modem/router has to dangle like an inch off the ground. There’s no real way to move it up for a better signal.
III: The modem/router is installed in the bedroom. Most nights I will stay up late while my wife is asleep in the bedroom with the door closed. The signal coverage for Wi-Fi was already pretty bad to begin with, but with the door closed it’s even worse. The internet was really terrible out here for a few months when I moved in last March until we bought another router to act as an “Access Point”.
IV: The “Access Point” router is a cheap TP-Link one I got off of Amazon, and we run an extremely long Ethernet cable down the hall to connect the two devices. The TP-Link router is configured to be an Access Point, however, I will admit I’ve always been bad at setting up a home network — so it’s actually setup as a different Wi-Fi network than the one in the bedroom, if that makes sense. So we’ll call the SSID in the bedroom “Nesta 1” (Don’t worry, that’s not the name of our network), and the SSID of the one in the living room is called “Nesta 2”.
V: There’s roughly eight different devices connected to “Nesta 2” at any given time. There are four phones, my PC, our TV, a Scanner/Printer combo, and of course, The Switch. The PS4 is also connected to this network, but it’s through an ethernet cable, not Wi-Fi, so I’m not sure that counts.
VI: There are only two devices I know of that regularly have any problems with staying connected to the internet. The Switch, of course. And my Moto G6 phone. Everything else is fine almost 100% of the time.
VII: “The Problem”: I don’t use my Switch that much most of the time, but whenever I do the connection is extremely unstable. For example, while playing Fire Emblem Three Houses, every time I would start a new day and it would try to pull in info from online players, it would fail to connect. This also happens if I try to share stuff on Twitter, it just won’t connect. So I have to go over to “Settings” and reconnect to the internet manually. It will restore the connection, but the next time I try to connect the connection will has been disrupted again, thus resulting in me having to go manually reconnect again.
Similarly, throughout the day on my phone, which I use constantly. I’ll try to refresh Twitter, but there won’t be an internet connection. So I have to open Chrome and try to connect to a website for it to restore the connection. I’ll put my phone down for a while, come back to it later, and have to repeat that process.
Things I’ve Tried
Alright, so there’s all the facts. Now onto the things I’ve tried:
-I’ve reset, turned off, and power cycled both the modem/router, and Access Point router numerous times.
-I’ve updated the Access Point router’s firmware to the latest version
-I didn’t mention it before, but our Wi-Fi network is setup with a password, and it’s WPA2-PSK
-Neither of these modem/router, or router are dual band. They’re both 2.4GHz band.
-I only just the other day got access to our Veriozn fiOS account which is in my mother-in-law’s name. But I still can’t login to the modem/router settings from my PC. I have the My fiOS app on my phone, but I haven’t been able to actually reboot the router through there either, because for whatever reason my device can’t find the router… or something? I’m not sure
-I’ve used programs on my PC to look at the devices that are connected to my Wi-Fi network, as well as look at other wireless networks in my apartment complex. I’ve tired to set my router to a less congested channel (1, 6, and 11). It’s currently configured to: Mode: 11bgn mixed, and Channel Width: 20Mhz.
-The Switch and my Phone always have the most up to date firmware.
…and, I think that’s it? I don’t really know what else to do at this point. When I was talking to Verizon over the phone the other day they said I had a few options for what I can do with my current plan. Something about dropping the TV package (we never, ever, ever use the TV part of our plan) and keeping the 100/100 internet plan. She might have mentioned we could upgrade the router in that plan? Maybe not? Or we could go with the more expensive Gigabit internet plan, and I’m pretty positive in that case that it comes with a new dual band modem/router.
Problem is, again, we’re pretty poor. I’ve also considered buying a new router for in the living room. Maybe something a bit more expensive, or in any case, newer?
I’ve also had people suggest I should talk to Nintendo about the Switch itself. But then how do you explain my Phone? A cursory Google search revealed that the Moto G6 does commonly have “these issues” though, so who knows?
So then… what do you all think? Help!
Thank you!
