I recently upgraded our router to the Linksys WRT320N router. I set the router to only transmit on 5GHz and the performance has been awesome because all our neighbors are still on 2.4 GHz, our 2.4 GHz cordless phones don’t interfere with our WiFi anymore and because 5GHz is better at getting around corners and going through walls.

Awesome… except on my personal MacBook.

Earlier today  I was on a 3.5 hour skype call (!!!) and every few minutes I’d get a 1 second delay before the other side’s conversation continued. They told me the same would happen with my voice. I also use SSH on my MacBook which requires a real-time response from the server. Every minute or so I’d notice a 1 to 3 second pause in my internet connection. The WiFi didn’t drop, it just paused as if it was busy doing something, and then continued as normal.

If you’re browsing or streaming something that pause probably won’t affect you because browsing usually has a second or two delay while DNS lookups occur etc, and streaming isn’t affected because it usually has a few seconds of content buffered. But with Skype and SSH it’s a real pain in the ass.

After tweaking the hell out of my router’s settings including Beacon Interval, RTS Threshold etc. and trying to disable things like Interference Robustness on my MacBook I finally found the culprit.

A little piece of software called GoBoingo was causing the problem. I launched Activity Monitor (under Applications / Utilities ) and stopped the GoBoingo process and voila! No more hiccups every 1 minute.

I’ve seen a few reports of other background MacBook apps that monitor your WiFi that cause this exact problem. So if you’re getting stutter, hiccups, pauses, latency or delays every minute or so, kill these apps and check if that’s fixed your connection quality.