Is it possible for WiFi to have an "unclean signal"?

[VirtualLarry]

I was having severe problems with this web site, with my two Intel 1007U netbooks (one with Linux, one with Win7 64-bit). It would take 3-5 minutes to load pages. Yet, at the same time, my wired HTPC would load pages in 10-15 seconds. The laptop would too, when I hardwired it.

Yet, it only seemed to affect this forum, for some reason.

I would get 40Mbit speed tests, at the same time I was getting timeout errors from this forum.

No other sites seemed to be affected.

Anyways, I turned off the 2.4Ghz wireless on my refurb Tomato E2500 router, and set up a new Asus RT-12 in AP mode.

Now I get 58Mbit speed tests, and ATF loads fine.

Was my old router "noisy"?

The wierd thing is, it only affected this site (well, I had some issues with images loading completely on techreport.com one night too), and only at certain times of day.

 

[Mushkins]

Short answer: not all wireless antennae are equal. Just by virtue of the RT-12 having external antennae instead of the internal of the E2500, they probably push a stronger signal.

And yes, that little bit of power difference could definitely be the difference between a slow/intermittent connection with tons of dropped packets and a smooth experience. 2.4Ghz is totally saturated by everything from cell phones to your neighbors microwave oven. I would consider all 2.4Ghz "noisy" and unreliable these days unless your nearest neighbor is a quarter mile away.

 

[SammichPG]

I was having severe problems with this web site, with my two Intel 1007U netbooks (one with Linux, one with Win7 64-bit). It would take 3-5 minutes to load pages. Yet, at the same time, my wired HTPC would load pages in 10-15 seconds. The laptop would too, when I hardwired it.

Yet, it only seemed to affect this forum, for some reason.

I would get 40Mbit speed tests, at the same time I was getting timeout errors from this forum.

No other sites seemed to be affected.

Anyways, I turned off the 2.4Ghz wireless on my refurb Tomato E2500 router, and set up a new Asus RT-12 in AP mode.

Now I get 58Mbit speed tests, and ATF loads fine.

Was my old router "noisy"?

The wierd thing is, it only affected this site (well, I had some issues with images loading completely on techreport.com one night too), and only at certain times of day.

Did you use the same channel?

I recently set up a wifi access point using an atheros usb dongle using hostapd under linux and the amount of possible settings and tweaks is staggering.

You can get significant performance variations while using the same hardware just by using different settings, adding a different chip with different antennas is way more complex to compare.

 

[theevilsharpie]

Although it is possible for a WiFi signal to be "dirty," I think it's more likely that the site you were trying to reach is using a load balancer, and you just happened to be "balanced" to a node that wasn't functioning properly.

 

[John Connor]

This site was having server trouble not too long ago...

http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2374299

 

[VirtualLarry]

Although it is possible for a WiFi signal to be "dirty," I think it's more likely that the site you were trying to reach is using a load balancer, and you just happened to be "balanced" to a node that wasn't functioning properly.

But why would the HTPC, wired to the same router, or the laptop in question, also hardwired to the same router, get 10-15 sec page load times, instead of 5 minute page load times?

I don't see how wired clients would end up on a different load-balancer than wireless clients, all hooked up to the same router.

 

[theevilsharpie]

But why would the HTPC, wired to the same router, or the laptop in question, also hardwired to the same router, get 10-15 sec page load times, instead of 5 minute page load times?

I don't see how wired clients would end up on a different load-balancer than wireless clients, all hooked up to the same router.

As far as the server/load balancer is concerned, different traffic flows are different users, even if you happen to share the IP.

 

[VirtualLarry]

But why would it be consistently so? (That the wired PCs are fast, and the wireless ones are slow to the point of HTTP timeouts.) Surely, the load-balancer would either round-robin, or randomly assign, and thus over time, it shouldn't be consistantly so.

 

[theevilsharpie]

But why would it be consistently so? (That the wired PCs are fast, and the wireless ones are slow to the point of HTTP timeouts.) Surely, the load-balancer would either round-robin, or randomly assign, and thus over time, it shouldn't be consistantly so.

I don't know. It's kind of hard to know for sure without diagnosing the problem as it happens. However, if your problem was with your wireless connection, you would experience problems with all communication attempts, not just to this one particular site.

 

[Cabletek]

I was having severe problems with this web site, with my two Intel 1007U netbooks (one with Linux, one with Win7 64-bit). It would take 3-5 minutes to load pages. Yet, at the same time, my wired HTPC would load pages in 10-15 seconds. The laptop would too, when I hardwired it.

Yet, it only seemed to affect this forum, for some reason.

I would get 40Mbit speed tests, at the same time I was getting timeout errors from this forum.

No other sites seemed to be affected.

Anyways, I turned off the 2.4Ghz wireless on my refurb Tomato E2500 router, and set up a new Asus RT-12 in AP mode.

Now I get 58Mbit speed tests, and ATF loads fine.

Was my old router "noisy"?

The wierd thing is, it only affected this site (well, I had some issues with images loading completely on techreport.com one night too), and only at certain times of day.

Without addressing your specific issue, yes it is possible to have unclean RF signal no matter what the source is. Distortion from over amplification is a bad thing except in the world of rock n roll music. I work on coax all day everyday and the craziest things can cripple the entire RF spectrum we run, wireless is no different. The most common cause would likley be the connectors for antennas, when they used to be external I cannot tell you how many setup s I fixed by just tightening them. Internal antenna are a lot harder to fix you have to have more of a electronic engineering background than I have, but even without hte antenna, a short in the RF path on the circuit board from some random piece of garbage or water that gets in there is all it takes.

However yours sounds like something else. Almost sounds like the channel you were on had more interference in the location the other two were more than anything else.

 

[azazel1024]

I wouldn't say a quarter mile. A couple of hundred feet is enough to make things pretty clean. The top signal strength I get from a neighbor inside of my house is around -85dB. Most are in the -90dB range on my laptop and windows tablet. On my iPhone and my old iPad 2 I could never pick up any of the other networks.

1.01 acre property surrounded by similar or larger properties. Nearest neighbor is ~100ft away, next nearest is about 200ft and most of the rest are >>>200ft away.

One thing that could be going on is, check your 802.11n preamble settings. Check both router and devices (if possible). Should be two choices, auto or mixed (could be greenfield/802.11n/HT only as a third option on the router). This is very important as 802.11n devices support much faster preambles. The problem is, this is not backwards compatible to 802.11a/b/g devices and ANY functioning 802.11a/b/g devices on your network, or any networks your devices can hear are going to CRUSH network through put as they all step all over each other.

You want auto or mixed.

Wifi is a CDMA technology is each device is going to try to listen to other devices before transmitting. If they transmit at the same time...problems. So the preamble to announce if they are about to transmit is very important.

I'd assume intermitent interference with neighbors networks and bad 802.11n preamble settings might be contributing too.

 

[dealguru]

Wireless adapters are not equal in terms of speed and efficiency.