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interference with wireless?

Gibson486

Gibson486

Lifer
When I first got FIOS, I began using the FIOS router. It sucked. On my main laptop, when I surfed wireless the connection would stumble and get really bogged fown. My gf complained of the same issue. At times, the connection would time out (wasn't as much as a problem with my work laptop) and other times the connections seemed to go through latency issues. I went back to my Motorola WR850G. I used it when I was on cable. It faired better, but once in a while, the connection would go boom and the router would go to the slowest connection possible. In a few instances, it disconnected me, but only to connect me back in about a minute.

This was never a problem in my old apartment....but one thing I did notice was that there has been an explosion of wireless connections (lots of whoch came after FIOS came). You think these wireless issues are due to interferance from the other APs? There are about 15 Very strong connections that I can see and about 30 all together. I am guessing that the explosion of FIOS routers made my FIOS router crap out and my Motorola (which now has DD-WRT) router to become unstable at times?

Also, does flashing the firmware to the thrid party stuff effect performance, or is it more for adding more features?
 
Certainly it's plausible. There are exactly three non-overlapping channels in the b/g band, putting ~30 APs in that space certainly introduces a strong possibility of interference (then there's teh microwave ovens and cordless phones, baby monitors & such that also interfere).

I'd probably start by running NetStumbler (www.netstumbler.com) and seeing what channels are being used. You could luck out and everyone else is on channel 6. In any case, pick the least used of channels 1, 6, or 11 (and fewest users of neighboring channels ...2-5... 7-10 ...).

Chances are, your best bet will be to move to 802.11a, where there's lots of available channels, far fewer other people to interfere with (and be interfered by) ... it's like moving to the 'burbs after living in the city ... it's wide open.

 
With that many in your area, it's is absolutely interference and in your case there is nothing you can do about it. ScottMac hit it on the head, you're going to have to move to 802.11a to get a reliable connection, you'll be amazed at the speed.
 
Originally posted by: spidey07
With that many in your area, it's is absolutely interference and in your case there is nothing you can do about it. ScottMac hit it on the head, you're going to have to move to 802.11a to get a reliable connection, you'll be amazed at the speed.
Click to expand...

No real reason to go to 802.11a, just get an 802.11n router (and adapters of course) that supports the 5 GHz band. But your point about getting away from the 2.4 GHz band is completely valid.
 
Originally posted by: Gibson486
Aren't most routers b/g? I do not think my routers do the a version, although, all my wirless cards can.
Click to expand...

If you decide to go the "a" way you need to buy a Wireless Router that is 802.11b/g/a

The Wireless cards need to be 802.11/b/g/a too (AKA Dual Radio).

I do not like to recommend Draft-N Wireless but some of them have dual radio for decent price.

Example, http://www.newegg.com/Product/...x?Item=N82E16833127254
 
I just changed to a different channel (never knew there was multiple channels on each wireless spec). Everyone was on channel 11 and 6. There were about 4 on 1, so i just chose channel 3. Man....it made a ton of dfference. I am downloading at about 150K with wireless compared to about 30K. I think i may try the FIOS router again since I was getting speeds bursts of about 210K...but i will save that for another day. I would move to N, but it is not standardized yet and I do not want some clunky card coming out of my laptop.
 
Get off of 3, go to Channel 1.

There is much overlap between channels (spacing is 5MHz, the channels are ~25 Mhz wide). So, sitting on channel 3, you are being interfered with from both channel 1 and channel 6 people (and you are interfering with them as well).

Moving to Channel 1 means you are only in contention with the Channel 1 people.

 
Originally posted by: ScottMac
Get off of 3, go to Channel 1.

There is much overlap between channels (spacing is 5MHz, the channels are ~25 Mhz wide). So, sitting on channel 3, you are being interfered with from both channel 1 and channel 6 people (and you are interfering with them as well).

Moving to Channel 1 means you are only in contention with the Channel 1 people.
Click to expand...

From the sounds of it, the bandwidth available is not between the device and router, but it's between the frequency and the device. In other words, the bandwidth is what is available in that specific frequency, not what is available between you and your AP?
 
Wireless is just like a dumb half-duplex hub. There is a common carrier among all devices associated to the AP - the channel. How fast you can move data on this common carrier is related to the signal to noise ratio of each device. So noise from other access points in the same or neighboring channels (see scottmac's post) really impacts available "bandwidth" between the access point and any clients.

Also having b clients anywhere near an ap 802.11g in b/g mode slows things down tremendously. Another thing that slows down performance is having clients connected at the lower data rates because it takes more time to send and receive their frames.

There is also a thing called channel load that is the overall load of the channel, not just your AP but any other APs near the channel. The 2.4 Ghz spectrum is extremely overcrowded as you have seen.
 
Like spidey and others have said, move to 802.11a. If you really want N wireless, make sure it can also do A as you may have good results with N but you may also have poor due to it still being in draft mode. I bought myself a dedicated 802.11a access point and I haven't looked back. If you can get an 802.11a router that's DDWRT capable, you can also make that just an AP as well fairly easy and DDWRT makes it reliable.

Regarding your question about flashing with 3rd party firmware. With respect to DDWRT it does add a lot more features but if you look at the reviews, it adds a lot more stability to it. The days of having the router lock up are pretty much gone with it. That's my number 1 reason for flashing mine over. The features are awesome too though.
 
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