Jeff's studio Wi-Fi had been misbehaving for weeks, so this segment became a clinic — and one you can follow along with on your own network, because Craig has Jeff run the test live.

The two bands do different jobs. 2.4 GHz travels farther and gets through walls and windows better, but it carries only a few channels, so in an apartment building or a dense neighborhood your neighbors are stepping on you. 5 GHz has the room but not the reach. Anything older than about ten years doesn't have the choice, and Wi-Fi 6, 7 and the coming 8 handle the congestion far better than what came before.

Then the diagnosis. Go to speed.cloudflare.com — free, no signup. Speed is the least interesting number it gives you. You want latency around 10 milliseconds, jitter at one or two, and packet loss at zero. Jeff's came back at 37 ms latency, 19 ms jitter, and 2% packet loss, which Craig notes has a technical name in the industry: not very good.

The rest of the segment is what to do about it — retest standing next to the router to separate "my house" from "my provider," metal studs and metal floors in commercial buildings, fluorescent lights and transformers, NetSpot on Windows, and the option-click trick on a Mac that shows you the interference numbers directly.

Craig also mentions the free computer scans now available through his site.

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