Periodic Network Jitter/Packet Loss solutions for WIFI users

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soul4kills
Posts: 108
Joined: 01 Aug 2025, 01:30

Periodic Network Jitter/Packet Loss solutions for WIFI users

Post by soul4kills » 25 Apr 2026, 00:36

If anyone experiences periodic packet loss/jitter like I used to. This post on reddit maybe your solution.This post goes over several root causes.

https://www.reddit.com/r/MoonlightStrea ... ntel_wifi/

I initially thought it was the intel driver that does a periodic background scan. So I used a custom intel driver that disables this. But it was still happening. Kinda gave up for a while, then I found the post mentioned above. I don't get that periodic network jitter/packet loss anymore that happens every 5-10 minutes.

For my case, what fixed it for me was specifically the locations services. Turning that off in windows solved it.

So why does locations services cause this? It's because it's a cheap form of getting an approximate location data. Wifi is used as a form of geolocation based on what has been mapped out by crowdsourcing. Similar to how apple does it with their iphones. It's always doing it. And microsoft is doing that same thing with their operating system.

You can read about it here.
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/win ... 5ca1c49088

Tell
Posts: 48
Joined: 09 May 2018, 07:27

Re: Periodic Network Jitter/Packet Loss solutions for WIFI users

Post by Tell » 25 Apr 2026, 07:16

Unrelated to the point of your post but If you want to stop using that potentially untrusted custom wifi driver you can restore a functioning Global BG Scan option with a registry edit. I confirmed this actually works using the latest official Intel wifi driver by using pingplotter as before it would spike almost exactly every ten minutes and now it's gone.

follow the steps in this post:

https://old.reddit.com/r/intel/comments ... l/n3nuu1w/

soul4kills
Posts: 108
Joined: 01 Aug 2025, 01:30

Re: Periodic Network Jitter/Packet Loss solutions for WIFI users

Post by soul4kills » 27 Apr 2026, 00:37

I appreciate the suggestion and your concern. It's a method I'm already aware of, but the custom driver is pretty widely used and can be trusted.

https://www.techpowerup.com/forums/thre ... es.326229/

This is the firmware I'm using. It has a lot of advance settings that allow you to fine tune your wifi latency. Just a warning, don't use the software that accompanies it if anyone decides to use it. Just install the driver. The software is trash.

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