the data light on my wireless router keeps going off?

Question

The internet works when this light is off but it goes so slow.

Answer 1

The data light indicates when data is moving through your network. Check and see who else is using a computer when this occurs. When multiple individuals are accessing resources they are using bandwidth. This causes others to have slower connections as they are sharing the bandwidth. Each system and each resource on that system shares bandwidth. You have many services and programs working in the background which have connections to the Internet, such as your Security Solution, your Office programs, any photo programs, your Media players, and many others have these connections and phone home for checkups on updates, etc. This is just an example, and add each individual computer on the network also having these items accessing bandwidth and you can see how some times you will have faster connections and other times it will be slower.

You also have to consider how each website you visit has a lot of traffic, which cause slower downloading of pages, and browsing across the net. During peak hours it slows to a crawl, and off peak hours it is much faster.

Then, if you use cable, you share you connection with many neighbors. Which also slows down the connection at peak usage times. DSL doesn't share with neighbors, which is why I choose that connection type of cable, even though theoretically cable is faster.

Answer 2

It could be that if you have not encrypted your wireless many other people are using it, in effect stealing your bandwidth.