Just giving some info. I was having issues with severe buffering on my fire stick. I ended up buying an Ethernet connection for the fire stick for $14 on Amazon and the difference is night and day. My service never buffered once yesterday and if it does buffer, it will be a handful of times per day only for a few seconds. I definitely recommend getting one and hard wiring your fire stick.
My Firestick is on a 5ghz WiFi connection and not on the same floor is my WiFi router and I do not buffer. My router is in a server closet upstairs and my fire sticks are all downstairs. Never have an issue even with 4 of them streaming at once.
That's why you are better off getting a streaming device with a dedicated Ethernet port.
Another thing with some of the 4k sticks... If you ever have your wifi cut out on your 4k stick, but you still see the home page, go to your network settings on the stick and see if it says "connected with problems". You can switch to your other wifi network and then back to 5ghz, but it usually does this over and over again. And it will drive you nuts.
The way to fix this is to go into your router settings and change you wifi network channel selection from automatic to a set channel. When you set it to automatic your router will change the channel of the wifi to one it thinks has less interference. But it disconnects your connected devices for a few seconds when it does this. It's hardly noticeable. However, for whatever reason, the 4k firestick doesn't seem to reconnect on the new channel. When you pick a specific one and leave it (2.4ghz uses channels 1-13 and it's best to pick 1, 7 or 13, and 5ghz uses somewhere near 32-48 and 132-165 approximately and it's probably best around 146). You won't have those disconnecting problems again on wifi.
I'm wondering if the OP was having this issue?
I have multiple 4k sticks connected to my wifi...2 of them i am connected to 2.4 and 2 are connected to the 5ghz...the reason for this is how far some are away...i barely buffer on the 2.4ghz and roughly the same on 5ghz...its all about maitenance of your equiptment...if your router doesnt have 5ghz id suspect its old and outdated and giving you buffering problems..sticks are designed to run on wifi, and truthfully get more bandwidth using wifi over the adaptor, which limits the speed to 100mbps going into your stick
Thanks for your advice, the buffer is unacceptable.
I have had many fire sticks across the whole house, never had any big issues with buffering.
Yes makes sense
Mines pretty damn good on 5g but this is good to know. Thank you!
I got 15 times faster wifi and the difference in both quality and buffering (used to buffer every minute, now doesnt buffer at all) is amazing.
Not all FireTV Sticks support 5 GHz. Many people are lured by the cheap low-end FireTV sticks only to find out that the performance is poor, both on the CPU side and WiFi side.
Not to bust anyone's bubble who already has the Amazon brand, but search Amazon for "Cable Matters Micro USB to Ethernet Adapter Up to 480Mbps for Streaming Sticks". The Amazon brand is only up to100Mbps. The Cable Matters brand is a 1Gbps adapter, but you will max out at 480Mbps due to the usb jack used on the Fire Stick. Price is basically the same. They have been out of stock and just got them back. If you read the reviews, this model is better and faster.
Can you post this adapter?
Nice. But need a longer test period
Thanks to OP for posting this, I was on the fence about get ethernet dongle...my tv is 2 feet from my router and get occassional buffering.
wifi fix fire is a app for amazon devices to fix issues if you have buffering plus you should be on 5.0
Maybe install speed test app on it first to see if it is a WiFi issue.
Interesting to know the dongle is that cheap. I always prefer wired over wireless if it's an option.
wow people learn that wired is better than wifi in 2020, amazing !
At this rate we might even go to the moon !
Glad to here. Can you test one more thing. Have you tried the 5ghz connection instead 2.4 ghz in the network settings? It worked for me and many others.