Moved into a new apartment. Holy bandwidth issue! [PIC]

[TurtleCrusher]

Pic says it all. I have CONSTANT drops where the net is unusable on any channel, whether it be 20/40mhz or 20mhz. I made tinfoil directional antennas and have a high-gain PCI WIFI N Antenna from only 15 feet away. Packet loss is at 10-80 out of 250 according to pingtest. My phones and tablet don't really experience the same slowdowns as my desktop and laptops do.

Money is a huge issue, and I cant upgrade all my stuff to dual-band N. Is getting a few 35ft lan cables my only way to go? :hmm:

 

[drebo]

Probably. Or reduce the channel width.

You can't really do anything about the amount of noise your equipment hears except to try new channels.

5ghz might be less congested. It also has the advantage of being a much wider set of frequencies.

 

[TurtleCrusher]

Yeah, I reduced the channel width and tested on every available channel. No dice. None of my equip is 5ghz capable, so I'm likely just going to get some lan cables.

I moved from a house to here and did not anticipate this whatsoever. I feel like a total noob again. I'm a radar tech in the Navy, so you'd think this would have already been on my mind before I moved into dense apartments...

 

[Cabletek]

You could try creating a sort of faraday cage effect against the outside sources but its not likely going to be better than going 5Ghz.

To do this you would basically line the walls of your apartment with tin foil and ground them to say the ground prong on a power outlet or the center screw point if there is metal to metal contact behind the plastic plate.

Whether it would work or not is another story and its a lot of tin foil so I feel you'd be better off saving that money for either ethernet cables or 5Ghz upgrades, personally.

It be a cool experiment to try out but not something I would bank on.

Not to mention it would also run your RF out of the air fast so it may be just as much of a hindrance as the noise is. Something like a fish tank may also held eat some of the noise up through higher attenuation, but again its going to eat yours up as well, so.

the most likely help you'd do is to get a higher gain add on antenna if your router supports that, but again, this is all in the realm of experiment and not a sure thing.

 

[Fardringle]

5Ghz is your best option with that many 2.4Ghz signals nearby.

 

[VirtualLarry]

5Ghz is your best option with that many 2.4Ghz signals nearby.

This. I had to move to 5Ghz as well. I used to have a 2.4GHz WDS setup with some WNR2000v2 Netgear routers with DD-WRT. Worked pretty well, until I started getting bandwidth drops, my throughput dropped to 1Mbit or less. (As low as the router would show.)
This is just into the next room.

I switched to a few refurb Cisco E2500 routers ($35 ea plus shipping at homestore.cisco.com), and put Shibby Tomato on them. Now my wireless ethernet bridge (stopped using WDS mode) on 5Ghz gives me about 30-40Mbit of throughput to the other room. Works pretty well thus far, and probably will continue to work well, until Verizon starts to ship Wireless AC routers that take up all of the 5Ghz bandwidth. (Most likely, FAR FAR into the future.)

 

[TurtleCrusher]

Thanks for the advice. It'll be a bit before 5GHZ means anything to me yet, as all of my N devices (2x phones, 1x tablet, 1 laptop) all use 2.4Ghz N, and my Wii uses G.

Amazon has a 50ft Cat5e cable for just $6.25 shipped 2-day with prime. That's so much less than I expected for the length. I'm mostly concerned with my desktop as that's my powerful computing machine still and if I cant use the internet sometimes, it's useless.