himespau 

My zwift machine (home-built Windows 10 PC with 16 GB RAM, AMD Ryzen 5 processor, and AMD Radeon RX560 GPU - built before I knew Zwift doesn't play nicely with AMD) has a wifi adaptor built into the motherboard, but I'm using that machine with an ethernet cable connected to the local node of my mesh network instead because running that way cut the lag from what I was doing on my pedals to what I would see my avatar doing on the screen from 2-3 seconds (when the machine was exclusively running on wifi) down to 1-2 seconds (same everything but machine was connecting to that node of the mesh via ethernet instead of connecting to it via wifi). Since my tablets seem to lose the internet (often while saying they're still connected to the network) from time to time, I haven't tried racing exclusively on wifi after this problem started because it didn't seem like that would improve signal reliability.

It could just be that one node of the mesh network has gone bad, but that wouldn't explain that the machine directly hooked to the main router has problems loading pages (some pages more than others - oddly it has a lot of trouble with Zwift Power and other Zwift-associated pages) when connected via ethernet cable to the router but not when connected via ethernet cable directly to the modem and the fact that tablets sometimes randomly transiently lose connection to the internet (without usually losing connection to the wifi network) no matter where they are in the house (much closer to the main router or the other node doesn't prevent the drops).

Because, when the tablets lost connection to the internet they often said they were still connected to the network, I had been assuming that the problem was with my modem (or even further upstream with the cable company) rather than my router, but, because the page-loading problem (I understand, that's TCP vs UDP and might not be related) went away when I connected that desktop directly to the modem, I'm now expecting that at least some of the problem is to be found in my router. Unfortunately, the Zwift machine is too far from the modem to physically connect via ethernet cable. I had considered trying to use a powerline connector, but I want to know where the source of the problem is because installing it downstream of the problem wouldn't fix anything and just be a waste of money (though, should I be able to fix the problem, I've been told that running a powerline adapter directly from my router would decrease the lag even more).

It has seemed weird to me that I'd be having these problems with my computers and tablets, but it hasn't seemed to affected my Alexa-devices (echo and echo dots), my streaming sticks, my smart TV, or my internet-connected remotes. I don't know whether those use a different type of signal, smaller packets of data that can slip through even with dropouts (or just be re-sent automatically until they get through), have more buffering and are less sensitive, or what.

Until I started not getting results recorded for races due to apparently getting dropouts at the end of races (did I mention how pissed I was that I had the fastest time of anyone in my cat in any of the 4 instances of the HErd HEries individual TT on Tuesday only to have my result not be recorded?), I didn't really spend too much time trying to hunt it down because, while annoying, the problems weren't really overwhelming - web page issue is usually solved by just hitting refresh a bunch of times, tablet wifi issue usually solves itself in a minute or less or when I switch to a different network frequency (router puts out 2 x 5 Ghz channels and one 2.6 GHz channel and I have an extender covering part of the house that's not on the mesh network - a relic of when my kids and a couple others in our pod did schooling at our house during the shutdown).

And yes, I've checked to see if Netgear has any firmware updates for my Nighthawk X6 R8000 router.