6 weird ways you're killing your own internet connection

Published Sep 20, 2026, 7:30 AM EDT Monica J. White is a journalist with over a decade of experience in covering technology. She built her first PC nearly 20 years ago, and she has since built and tested dozens of PCs. PC hardware is her main beat, and graphics cards and the GPU market at large are her main area of interest, but she has written thousands of articles covering everything related to PCs, laptops, handhelds, and peripherals. From GPUs and CPUs to headsets and software, Monica's always willing to geek out over all things related to computing. Outside of her work with How-To Geek, Monica contributes to TechRadar, PC Gamer, Tom's Guide, Laptop Mag, SlashGear, Whop, and Digital Trends, among others. Her ultimate goal is to make PC gaming and computing approachable and fun to any audience. Monica spends a lot of time elbow-deep in her PC case, as she's always making upgrades, testing something, or plotting out her next build. She's the go-to tech support person in her immediate circle, so she's never out of things to do. Whenever she has spare time, you'll find her gaming until the early hours and hanging out with her dog. Look, I'll be the first to blame my ISP whenever possible. (In my defense, I have ISP-inflicted trust issues, so I have a bit of an excuse there). But sometimes, the ISP should be allowed to say: "It's not me, it's you." There are many ways for us to kill our own internet connections, and some of them are real oddballs. For instance, did you know that your USB gadgets might be messing up your entire internet connection? Congratulations, you've accidentally built a loop I usually trust my Ethernet connections so much more than I do anything wireless. I'll be side-eyeing my Wi-Fi on a near-regular basis, and I silently judge people who have a desktop PC and still connect it via Wi-Fi when Ethernet is right there. (I'm sure you have valid reasons, I'm sorry.) Unfortunately, sometimes, Ethernet can be the culprit in your internet issues ... but in this one case, it's kind of self-inflicted. I'll explain. Ethernet connections can betray you spectacularly if you make a mistake and create a loop. Plug both ends of the same cable into a switch, or connect two switches together with multiple paths and no loop protection, and Ethernet frames can start circulating around the network over and over again. At that point, broadcast traffic gets duplicated somewhere along the way. This leads to a broadcast storm that spills over to your entire LAN, sometimes slowing it down to a crawl, or worse yet, making it stop responding altogether. You'd think that this isn't easy to do, but it actually really is. Better switches can use things like Spanning Tree Protocol or loop detection to block these accidental and fully redundant paths, but if yours don't have those fancy features, you might be ruining your connection without knowing. That old router you turned into an access point might still be running DHCP Two devices are now fighting over who actually owns your network Credit: Andrew Heinzman / How-To Geek Repurposing your old router as an access point is a great way to keep using it even after you've moved on to greener pastures (as in, a newer router). But there's one problem: DHCP. That's the service responsible for handing out IP addresses and other network settings to your devices. Sounds useful, but if your main router is already doing exactly that, you've got an impending conflict on your hands. The result won't immediately tell you that this is the issue, but it'll be one big mess. One device might get the right settings from the main router, but something else will get all the wrong memos from the secondary router. The sure-fire way to clean this up is to disable DHCP on the old router and use its dedicated AP or bridge mode. Your USB gear can interfere with 2.4GHz Wi-Fi Coincidentally, that's where a lot of your devices live Credit: Patrick Campanale / How-To Geek Yup, I'm not joking. If you have USB 3.0 gear plugged in near the router or your target device, your 2.4GHz band might be in shambles. High-speed USB signaling can generate radio frequency noise around the same spectrum as the one used by the 2.4GHz band. This means that an external drive, a hub, or even just a flash drive could be messing with your connection, and you won't even know. Worse yet, the USB device doesn't even need to have anything wireless inside it. Just being USB 3.0 is enough for this. As is always the case with this sort of stuff, the symptoms won't tell you that it's USB. Slower Wi-Fi, higher latency, disconnects. But diagnosing it is easy: run a speed test with all the USB gear plugged in, and then unplug it and check again. Picking the "better" 5GHz channel can make Wi-Fi vanish Gotta love that for us Credit: Hannah Stryker / How-To Geek Sometimes, if you try too hard, optimizing your Wi-Fi can actually shift things in the opposite direction and make them worse. Go figure. On the 5GHz band, some of the quieter channels are DFS channels. They share the same spectrum with radar systems, which your router is required to keep an ear out for. If it detects any radar activity, it needs to get off that channel immediately, and for you, that means a brief, unexpected disconnect or a 5GHz network that seems to disappear for no reason. So, yeah, these DFS channels are kind of a trap. They look super empty, but they're empty for a reason. Jumbo frames can break things instead of making them faster MTU has to agree from one end of the path to the other Credit: Bertel King / How-To Geek Jumbo frames sound like something you want to enable. Bigger Ethernet frames mean less overhead, so what's not to like there? The problem is that every device along the path needs to agree on the maximum transmission unit (MTU), and that's not such an easy task. Let's say your PC is sending 9,000-byte frames but a different device, such as the router, is capped at 1,500 bytes. Those oversized packets can get dropped like a hot potato. When this is happening to your connection, you might see it becoming a little selective. Basic browsing might still work, but certain apps and websites will timeout, as will larger transfers. The solution for most people here is to leave MTU at the default setting and not play around with jumbo frames. One manually assigned IP address can randomly knock devices offline Don't drop static addresses inside your DHCP pool Credit: Monica J. White / How-To Geek Static IP addresses are useful, sure. But only until you accidentally assign one inside the same range that your router uses for DHCP. At that point, the router can hand that exact same IP address to another device, and that means a conflict on the network. You might see one device work while the other one doesn't (well, the internet connection on said devices, at least), or connectivity that comes and goes. An easy way around this is to set up a DHCP reservation if you need a static address for something like a NAS or a printer. Your ISP isn't always the one ruining your day One of my ISPs tried to force me to pay them $1,000 to break a contract early, even though my internet would go up to 50 times a day. Yes, fifty, and no, it's not hyperbole. So, I get defaulting to blaming your ISP. It's just that sometimes, the blame lies elsewhere, so it's worth checking whether there's anything you can fix on your end before starting a war with the ISP.