Wireless headphones interfere with Wi-Fi signal on laptop

I have Medion MD 84299 wireless (not Bluetooth) headphones and they work totally fine.

The problem is that once I turn on the headphone’s base station, Wi-Fi signal on my laptop becomes poor and download speed goes from 70 mbps to 2 mbps.

Is there a way to fix this?

Solution 1:

The wireless headphones are working in the same frequency as Wi-Fi, 2.4Ghz, according to the official Medion MD 84299 user manual (PDF).

If your WiFi supports 5GHz use it. That is almost always the best solution. If not, try a different channel for WiFi -> 1, 6 and 11 are preferable.

Also try to keep the headphones' base station as far as possible from the WiFi antennae.

Solution 2:

GabrielaGarcia has a very good answer already, but I'll expand a bit on it.

If you still got the receipt on those headphones, I'd consider returning them. They come from an era where not everybody was using Wi-Fi at home and everything using a radio went to 2.4 GHz because it's an ISM band. Which was a world of fun with older microwave ovens... Anyway, Wi-Fi was a simple enough protocol so a lot of electronics that needed a bit of bandwith ended up using some version of it. Not necessarily exactly to spec, but it didn't have to as long as it stayed within the 2.4 GHz ISM and could communicate well enough with whatever it had to (your base station to your headphones and vice versa). Which wasn't a big deal until everybody started using Wi-Fi, especially at higher speeds.

While Bluetooth and plenty of other technologies are also on that band, they use different methods to communicate. For example, Bluetooth uses a method of adaptive frequency hopping that's so fast (and the sub-bands it uses so narrow) that it's a lot harder to disrupt. It's also slower, yes, but still plenty fast for high-quality audio over headphones. And it doesn't disrupt your Wi-Fi as much, since it's less likely to be using exactly the same frequency as your router. The manual doesn't seem to indicate which exact Wi-Fi band it uses, so it might be hopping all over the place trying to find the best slot just as your router is doing the same. Who knows.