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What's Killing Your Wi-Fi?
Barence writes "PC Pro has taken an in-depth look at Wi-Fi and the factors that can cause connections to crumble. It dispels some common myths about Wi-Fi problems — such as that neighboring Wi-Fi hotspots are the most common cause of problems, instead of other RF interference from devices such as analogue video senders, microwave ovens and even fish tanks. The feature also highlights free and paid-for tools that can diagnose Wi-Fi issues, such as inSSIDer and Heatmapper, the latter of which maps provides a heatmap of Wi-Fi hotspots in your home or office."
Billions of ads + need to check 15 pages to RTFA... and the article is actually a little shallow...
microwave knocks ours out. Router 200-300 feet away, and microwave much closer to the computer endpoint.
It's true. And what's more, honey badger don't give a sh*t!
The CB App. What's your 20?
Both InSIDDer and Heatmapper are Windows-only, AFAIK. For Linux, there's the awesome Kismet and its cousin for OS X, KisMAC.
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I've had pretty much the same experience with cheap analog A/V senders. It was kinda cool turning it on and off - "now you have internets - now you don't."
Microwaves, on the other hand, I've never had any trouble with. I can stand next to it cooking something and troll facebook at the same time.
for i in `facebook friends "=bday" 2>/dev/null | cut -d " " -f 3-`; do facebook wallpost $i "Happy birthday!"; done
http://www.ekahau.com/products/heatmapper/overview.html is totally unavaliable
I've got some Wifi problems in my apartment. In the room with the AP, everything is fine. In the next room, transfer speeds are in the toilet. I used 'WLAN AP Grapher', which gives a graph of signal and noise over time, but that indicated no change in the S/N ratio between rooms. This rather surprised me. If there's interference, there should be noise in the frequency range used by the WLAN.
And on that note: anyone know of a tool for OS X that shows WLAN speeds in a graph ?
1.) You must have had some bad luck there, which sucks for you, but Linux actually has pretty good WiFi chipset support.
2.) Have you tried using the manufacturer supplied drivers (which you may have to compile yourself), instead of the open source ones? I have seen this fix things on some Broadcom models. Also note, if you have installed these, I have experienced Ubuntu writing over these with the old drivers when it "updates". You can probably blacklist this.
for i in `facebook friends "=bday" 2>/dev/null | cut -d " " -f 3-`; do facebook wallpost $i "Happy birthday!"; done
My wifi was going great... until the neighbours decided to secure their network
. .
Have you tried using NDISwrapper? I haven't tried it myself, but if you are able to use the same driver as in Windows, everything *should* work the same way.
What is the actual use of Analog Video Senders anyway?
Is this what is being advertised for start watching in one room and finish in another from various cable providers?
I note that back in 2009 when a dimilar story was posted it was baby monitors that were taking the blame, even tho video senders were mentioned back then as well.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Nothing in this story talks about Linux.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Why don't people talk more about using a wire to an access point to get the wireless where you want it ?
Because of the difficulty of stringing wires thru finished construction, especially when you rent.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
I knew that goldfish was up to something!
Research from the Farpoint Group suggests that data throughput can fall by 64% within 25ft of a microwave, and Farpoint analyst Craig Mathias said the firm had even “seen problems at 50m”.
I'm sorry but if this is the case you have far bigger problems with your microwave then simply WiFi interference.
RUN!
affinity for lathe and plaster.
Crap firmware and products.
That is what is killing my wifi.
I would also like to add:
1) Wall Street fascist pig CEO types who need that 5th mansion and stupid Board directors and shareholders who let him get away with it while the companies network infrastructure rots to hell.
That doesn't help my wifi either.
2) Closed proprietary crap hardware primarily by CISCO that makes it impossible to produce decent firmware via a 3rd party even after you bought the damn thing.
Apparently in a fascist system you really don't get to own anything you buy and can go to jail if you try and figure out how it works or make your own improvements.
Poor WRT guys, how they must suffer. Even though they work really hard, their firmware still sucks because the binary blobs they get with the radios suck it and my Wireless N router (WRT600N) still, has to auto reboot every 24 hours or it just plain stops working.
3) Finally I would like to thank all of the fascist members in Congress for creating laws that pretty much guarantees our wifi will suck.on a country wide basis, insuring intellectual property nonsense will continue to make wifi blow.
-Hack
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
I'm not sure about how it works in the standard US setup, but here in the UK if you want more than basic OTA broadcast reception you'll have a set-top-box - either cable decoder, or sat decoder. That's fine for watching in one room, but how do you watch those channels in another? One way is to rent a second STB, which means lots of money plus pulling new cable through the walls. The other is a TV sender. Takes the STB output, transmits it, reciever in another room gets them and outputs to TV. Only drawback is you can't change the channel remotely, and some will even do that by transmitting the IR signal the other way over radio.
They used to work by just transmitting an analog TV signal that any TV in range could pick up with a loop antenna, but those were banned years ago due to interference issues (And, according to rumor, a few incidents of pornography ending up on the neighbour's TV). The new ones operate up in 2.4GHz band, killing wireless networks.
PC Wiper Mag. Crashed Google Chrome browser. One of very few websites able to do this. No stars, I give this post 10 toilets.
What's killing your Wi-Fi? Or rather, who? *maniacal laughter*
Mini Portable Signal Jammer (Wi-Fi/GPS)
8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
Have you tried using NDISwrapper? I haven't tried it myself, but if you are able to use the same driver as in Windows, everything *should* work the same way.
It does work the same way - badly!
Well, I used mine to connect the computer at one end of the (large) living room to the TV at the other end. The device I'm talking about does nothing more advanced than transmit a composite video signal from one point to another, wirelessly.
for i in `facebook friends "=bday" 2>/dev/null | cut -d " " -f 3-`; do facebook wallpost $i "Happy birthday!"; done
Nachos
"I bless every day that I continue to live, for every day is pure profit."
Which is why I only use Atheros chipsets. Rock solid Linux support since the 2000's using madwifi drivers. Such a same that Broadcom is cheaper, so most integrated chipsets/cheap hardware use it. Intel's wireless is ok on Linux. Not as good as Atheros (prone to firmware resets on my Thinkpad, but with no noticable loss of connection, as it resets immediately) but perfectly usable.
This doesn't help you now, but for future reference (and for other readers), stay the hell away from Broadcom for Linux. Useless wireless drivers (their hardware is kinda useless as well, especially their gigabit ethernet hardware).
"stringing wires through finished construction" might cost a bit, but it is not difficult at all. If you want to do it yourself, any of the electrical books at Lowes or Homedepot will show you the steps involved.
You can also go the cable-company route, leave the wires exposed, and staple them to the wall.
I have.. I can't watch Hulu or anything in the kitchen while I'm waiting for something to microwave. The signal just craps out (stays connected, but there's just too much noise over the signal). That's even with the router less than 25' away down stairs, though the microwave would be about 10' away.
Go 5GHz with WPA2 and 802.11n -- you'll have great performance until all your neighbours do the same.
Go wired (gigabit) when you can -- that's faster and more secure.
If you're forced to run on 2.4, don't expect great things in crowded (spectrum) areas. Do spectrum scans, and if you can't work with one of the non-overlapping 2.4GHz channels (1,6,11), and can't use a directional antenna (you can build your own corner reflector or parabolic reflector for under $1) try 3 or 8 and don't worry about HT (high throughput) datarates.
Take up arc welding as a hobby.
Your microwave should not leak any signals/radiation... The inside of a microwave is basically a faraday cage (look at the metal mesh which runs through the glass on a typical microwave door).
If it does leak radiation, then its faulty and you really should get it repaired or replaced ASAP as it can be quite dangerous (wifi cards are typically under 1 watt of power, a microwave could be up to 1300 watts and the full force of one will cook you quite quickly).
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Get an STB which supports streaming over IP such as a dreambox or a custom built linux box...
Then you have a choice, ethernet, powerline adapters, wifi (still using 2.4ghz but in a cleaner way) etc. You can change the channel remotely on them too.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
If you really want to have fun, get your ham radio license -- hams can run up to 1.5 Kilowatts on the lower part of the 2.4 GHz band!
The CRT part was interesting; curious to see further documentation on that.
Furries make the internet go.
You've had unlucky experiences, or your trolling...
On all of the machines i've tried in the last couple of years (atheros, broadcom, realtek and ralink chipsets), wireless has worked out of the box under Ubuntu (and in some cases i have used gentoo successfully with wifi), whereas Windows hasn't always supported the wireless card out of the box (which makes downloading the drivers a pain), and other weird problems like the drivers supporting wep but not wpa (i thought it was up to the os rather than the drivers to dictate encryption support).
The performance has generally been better on the linux drivers too, not to mention that most linux drivers support rfmon mode while i'm not aware of any windows drivers that do.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Sadly there are plenty of crummy microwaves that will cause trouble with your wifi, at least if your access point is near the microwave. I saw this pretty frequently while working tech support a bunch of years back (right around the time when everyone wanted wireless even if their computer was next to their NAT router).
Now, I didn't ever see it be the only source of signal loss but for those who already had a fairly weak signal placing the AP near the microwave did occasionally result in their connection dropping every time they used the microwave.
So I suspect it's more a matter of crappier microwaves interfering just a little, but just a little is enough when you already have a bad signal (and what really bothered me was how few users were able to figure out the correlation between "turn microwave on" and "wifi stops working").
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
They're used a lot for half-assed CCTV systems, with applications ranging from video baby monitors, to security video, to hidden pedobear spy cams. The cheap ones are generally pretty ugly unless the planets align just-so, and tend to shit all over whatever band they're using.
There are a few companies that produce more professional versions of such devices, which include very directional, polarized antennas. These play a little nicer with the RF spectrum, but are still bandwidth hogs. They only reason they play nice at all is to avoid interference with other devices of the same type -- not to be nice to Wi-Fi signals. (I've got a few such devices in a parking lot affixed to light poles in a light industrial area, and in this fixed installation they work great. But if that customer wanted WiFi and analog security cameras, there'd be some potential issues...)
No. Such installations as that use either Ethernet (802.3 or 802.11), or HPNA (over existing coax or telephone wires), or something proprietary (DirecTV's SWIM system). They're not analog at all (in any conventional sense), and are almost always wired. Installers tend to avoid using wireless for these applications whenever possible (it's expensive, and it's error-prone, resulting in service calls, which make it more expensive yet...).
Kid-proof tablet..
My 8 year old Airport base station dying, that's what killed it.
Not mentioned in this article was the problem of people operating poor quality routers. Ironically enough that they quoted a rep from Belkin in the article, cheap $30 routers from the likes of Belkin, D-Link and such from the local Wal-Mart electronic section tend to have a bad habit of "dropping out", or freezing traffic to the point to where the only solution is to power off and power on the router. On some bad quality routers this happens nearly 100% of the time under heavy traffic loads (2 or more computers watching Netflix, for example).
The solution to this is to invest more than $30 into a home router.
put the cell phone in the microwave, close the door, if you call and it rings, u have a leak
another trick on smartphone is to install some kind of wifi analyzer and put it in microwave, close the door and watch signal strength
A faraday cage attenuates RF. It doesn't eliminate it completely. You'd need perfect conductors for that.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Once my daughter goes to sleep and my wife turns this bad boy on, my wireless network totally falls apart.
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=110693416818&clk_rvr_id=236365054762
Seems quite common, I work in IT and now and again I get asked do you know why my wiresless network is so crap and a lot of the times they've just had a baby.
This is not at all true. There shouldn't be substantial RF leakage, but it would be an impressive accomplishment to not leak ANY RF energy, especially given the high power involved. Even tempest-hardened environments leak plenty. There as here, the main culprit tends to be the power lines... They make good antennas, carrying RF signals from inside the metal box, to the outside world.
And as for danger, sure, it could be dangerous, but we're talking about "touching an electric hot plate" kind of danger, here, and that only in an extreme case, and only if you're very close by... nothing too exotic.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
In my carefully controlled laboratory (the basement of my parent's house), I decided to try things that would enhance the wireless connectivity. "Scientists" tend to only focus on the negative. Who wants to read something that very craftily calls us idiots? Summary of article the article I didn't read: "Want better wireless? Get rid of the microwave, dumb ass!"
I'm going to write a paper. But my parents want me to clean up the basement first. I don't feel like it ...... so its going to take a while. :)
In writing this more positive paper, I felt gold dust would be the best stuff to sprinkle in the air to enhance wireless signals. After all, this stuff works *MIRACLES* for stereo cables and computer cables. Why not wireless signals?
So I installed some fans in the basement to blow the gold dust around while testing my wireless network. I tried 3 different gold samples. 1) Gold bought from Dollar Store. 2) Gold bought from Pawn Shop. 3) Gold extracted from Monster Cables.
Total cost of materials (gold): $2000*. Acquiring gold from the first two sources was much cheaper than the 3rd (see Marketing Materials as reference).
I'm not going to bore you with the methodology. "What was the purity of the samples?", you might ask. I trust I'm getting 100% Gold from all my sources. They told me it is.
Suffice it to say, my paper will conclude (I'm not done looking at most if of the results just yet and don't think I need to) that sprinkling gold dust in the air boosted wireless signals up to 2 x 10 ^ 3 % (this is a scientific study so I must use scientific notation!). I'll leave the reader to conclude which of the 3 sources resulted in the best results. Frankly, I lost track.
xbox 360 controllers.
ps3 controllers.
bluetooth.
electrical motors for ceiling fans.
cordless phones in the 2.4Ghz range.
cheap RC cars/planes/helicopters.
Your paper shredder, while it's running.
your 5 neighbors' wifis all on channel 6.
CFL bulbs. (They tend to absorb radio signals.)
All of these will interfere with wifi. Perhaps you should switch to 5Ghz 802.11N
They're using their grammar skills there.
Why don't you just buy another STB for the other room? Since you're likely to be plugging it into a relatively small TV then cheap crappy SD STB will work just fine. You can pick up an el-cheapo DVB-S STB for about (can't type a pound sign, since slashcode has a horrible regression)10 these days.
ATTENTION SLASHDOT JANITORS: YOUR SITE HAS A REGRESSION. I filed a bug months ago. Fix non-ASCII characters, or at least put them back the way they were.
I find that wireless works fine out of the box on kubuntu. as long as you aren't trying to connect to a hidden network with a space in it's name... I have yet to find any way to do that under kubuntu except manually on the command line, and even that's hit and miss. This goes for the past 3 major releases.
...replaced my 802.11b/g/n access point with a 802.11a/n access point and now all my troubles seems so far away...
5 GHz is empty in residential areas.
That only works if you don't need magical decryption (e.g. digicipher 2, like my satellite provider uses) crap in the STB.
also, try £ to get a £
same works for euro and yen signs.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
a microwave could be up to 1300 watts and the full force of one will cook you quite quickly).
Oh come on. Even in open air, with no shielding, the power density of a 1.3kW magnetron falls below that of normal sunlight at somewhere under two feet.
Yeah, but non-working wifi and Linux have gone hand in hand for a long time. Its a lot better now, but...
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Back in the day...
When WiFi was just starting to get rolled out in most businesses, I had set up a multi access-point wireless network that had worked really well for about five months. Then, with no known changes, it started dying across the entire building almost every afternoon about the same time.
I worked with the building maintenance staff to try to find any electrical gear that might be starting up about that time with no luck. Finally, because the executives loved their wireless, I had to buy a spectrum analyser to try to track down the problem. I kept it on my desk until the next time we had an outage and started following the high amplitude broadband noise that had suddenly appeared.
The directional antenna led me straight to the kid that worked in the mailroom who had his feed up on the desk talking into a wireless phone. I pulled the plug on it and the noise stopped, the network reappeared. He'd brought in a consumer wireless phone so he could talk to his girlfriend while he moved around the mailroom sorting mail. I'm surprised his hair wasn't smoking with the signal the thing was emitting.
I took it away from him and everyone, except maybe his girlfriend, was happy. :)
It will kill any kind of transmission in the house but my parent wont replace it as any replacement they had was not as fast as this 2500W monster....
Because heaven forbid they wait an extra 20 seconds...
My parent's microwave interferes with their video sender but not their wireless, though the video sender *does* interfere with the wireless network (no matter what channel the AP is using), pushing it down from 5Mbit+ in the chair nearest to the sender to ~1Mbit.
I suspect that most people who have trouble with microwaves are people who have very bad reception anyway - their laptop or other machine being in a position (either due to distance, materials between them and the router, other sources of interference, bad kit, or some combination of the above) where the wireless connection barely works. That last tiny bit of interference lifts the noise level above the useful signal level, but until that point the users don't notice the bad signal reception as they are only checking email and facebook (or performing other tasks that generally work fine despite low bandwidth and high latency) or are blaming slow responses on the sites or the ISP rather than the local network leg.
1) Don't run ethernet through the walls, run it through at the bottom of the baseboard. drill through as low as you can get the drill to go, and push your runs under the base, around to the hole, then through.
2) Paint the visible parts of the cable (about 1.5 inches near each hole) the same color as your baseboard.
3) ???
4) Profit.
Because heaven forbid they wait an extra 20 seconds...
It's a microwave man; the whole point is speed. If you're going to suffer eating nuked food, you better damn well at least get a speed advantage out of it.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
even people can block wifi, my router is next to a desktop in the office at the front of the house, normally i get about 75% signal strength, when someone is sitting at that desk it drops down to about 55% to 60% and i notice the slowdown...
this router has a rubber ducky antenna so while searching for a way to improve my signal quality i found this and it really does work, now when someone is sitting at the office desk near the router it does not weaken the signal and the overall signal averages about 85% solid without problems
build one of these out of heavy paper like card stock or similar (cereal box cardboard) and aluminum foil http://www.freeantennas.com/projects/template2/
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Oh, I don't know, I've never had a wifi based machine that would not work under linux.
Occasionally I've had to load ndiswrapper, but in the end every one of them worked.
Lately most distros figure this out by themselves, and load what ever is necessary, fetch the firmware and do the whole
nine yards.
Still, windows-centric drivers are manufacturer problem, not just a linux problem, and one that even they are starting to realize
is not going to cut it going forward.
On the other hand, I've actually been forced to swap out mini-pci cards in windows machines to
get to one that would handle WPA2.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
I'm guessing the nuclear powerplant I built in my backyard isn't helping... That and the invasion of sentient bloodthirsty mutant animals.
The shielding of a microwave is designed to prevent it from cooking you, not to block the tiny bit of leakage that interferes with wifi
A friend was having a problem trying to get wireless working on his Linux laptop. Turns out the ssb module had to be blacklisted as it would interfere with the wireless system. He could do it (manually messing around with the necessary .conf file), but it's still a joke and completely demolishes the argument that Linux is ready for the desktop.
I had the same problem with a customer that turned out had one of those 'wireless security camera' setups set up in his workroom so he could watch his property. I checked for a microwave oven, cell phone interference, finally I walked around the property looking for anything that could cause trouble and spotted the cam. Sure enough I had him turn it off and bingo! WinXP detected and hooked up to his wireless network. Now once it hooks up it works fine, but if the camera is running on first setup you're boned.
Personally I'll be glad when they start selling those whitespace devices. For really short runs like giving a home Internet access there shouldn't be any reason why they can't just use the whitespace, especially if the device is low power. As it is there is simply too much crap running at the 2.4GHz frequency, hell just sitting in my apt I probably have a dozen routers I can hook up to and I am living in a small town. I can't even imagine what a nightmare keeping devices working in say an apt in DC or LA must be like. The interference must be insane!
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
I've had no wifi in my living room since they installed the new power meters on the outside wall. What i found in that the meters are on 2.4GHz and use up to 4watts output. They are some kind of mesh network to each other. I had to take down my wifi on that outside wall to my brothers house. It quit working and the input amp was destroyed do to proximity to the meter. 5feet away. Lost two wrt54's before I figured it out. I'm tempted to wrap the meters in tinfoil as a message to the power co. But I like my freedom too much. Can't afford to take on a 500lb gorilla.
Singed;
Living on the wire now...
I don't want a pickle; I just want a Motor-Cycle! A four foot cop arrived with a five foot gun!
One swallow does not a summer make.
I've had similar odd driver related problems problems with windows machines.
Does that "complete demolish" the argument that windows is ready for the desktop?
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Buy a new microwave oven: sounds like it is leaking badly!
--
no sig for you. come back one year.
SNAKE!!!
Some urban legend is circulating that this will work for radiation, but it will definitely work for WiFi interference: Set a bag of microwave popcorn out on the counter. If it starts popping, you've probably got WiFi interference problems.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
Parent post wrongly assumes a standard US household socket, which is max 120 volt, 15 amp, 1800 watt.
Other replies to parent port appear to wrongly assume various European outlets. European household power is generally 220-240 volt, but max amperages are all over the map -- literally. They range from 15 amp / 3750 watt to as low as 5 amp / 1250 watt, depending on country, IIRC.
We don't appear to know the country of the grandparent post's parents' microwave. We can't even say "European" for sure; some early US models were hardwired, and so might have had a higher than usual power draw.
Power sockets exemplify the "I love standards -- there are so many to choose from!" concept.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
My parents couldn't understand why connecting to their Wi-Fi was intermittent. Though once connected, it all worked fine.
Then I looked into it and found that both they and some neighbour used the same network name: "wireless" (obviously the factory setting), but with different passwords. And this was setup by some IT guy (not me). <facepalm>
I changed the network name, and all is well now. :)
I wonder how common it is for people to unwittingly use each others' Wi-Fi because they use factory settings...
Because you don't *buy* them. You *rent* them. Those boxes are propritary. The only box that'll work on a cable network is the one by the cable company, which is available only for rent, not sale. Things are a little better with sat - the non-branded box will get you the unencrypted channels only, which really means the shopping channel and not much else. If you want channels you can actually watch and that arn't on freeview anyway, you still need to rent the box.
It certainly isn't likely to cook you any faster than the food inside. You wouldn't, for example, fall over dead from cooking on your way to turn it off.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
What annoys me is why these devices don't just use the network that is available. I spent a lot of time looking for a baby monitor (something without a camera) that could just send over my existing wireless network but came up empty.
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
The article is not even getting the technical facts right, much less the grammar. Shouldn't we expect better from PCPro? No, I guess not.
have one with 2 wireless speakers for the back channels.... I loved it while i was oblivious to the fact that it kill wifi in a 3ft radius!
...until i tried to play online on the wii.
Now i have to choose if I want 5.1 audio or multiplayer.
It really depends on the age and quality of the microwave oven. I have a client that has a really old beast of a microwave that is pre-1980's old. I have a tool on my laptop to analyze the 2.4Ghz band and I could see that some channels would be obliterated with noise when the microwave was on. This just meant assigning the access points to channels least effected by the noise. In newer and/or higher grade routers, the auto-select feature should pick out a good channel so this would be a non-issue anyway.
I Cater to the Needs of Stupid People. - from a coffee mug Christmas gift
... mismatched devices!
You would not believe how many people "upgrade" their broadband to 20+ Mbit/sec service and then complain that their computer is still only getting 1-3Mbit/sec speeds. A lot of them don't realize that the older 802.11 devices can significant reduce the performance of a modern wireless network.
Most 802.11b devices (which are still in use today) usually top out at around 10-11Mbit/sec, and that's under perfect conditions. If you start adding multiple users, competing networks and outside interference, things get out of hand pretty quick.
Here's a list of things to look for in examining your wireless network for performance issues:
- Replace the router.
If you're router is over 3 years old, it might be time to replace it. Especially if it's an older 802.11a/b model. The really old 802.11 devices, like Apple's original AirPort base station, have a lot of problems working correctly when they encounter other networks within their own service range. This can result in dropped or spotty connections and overall losses in bandwidth. Many of these first generation wireless network devices barely worked, but they worked well enough for the few people that could afford them. Most of these devices have since been trashed for more recent models either because they started failing under the weight of other networks or simply died from various flaws or age.
- Update the firmware.
Many wireless devices have firmware chips on them that can be upgraded through software. This can help weed out networking issues that might be caused by buggy firmware, or may add enhanced features that can help your device work better under heavier loads from competing networks, interference, multiple users and various security issues.
- upgrade all client-end networking hardware at the same time.
When putting a wireless network together, or upgrading an existing one, make sure your client devices use similar configurations. (Or identical, if possible...) A single, poorly configured client device can significantly impact your wireless network's performance. By making the network devices functionally similar to each other, the simpler it will be to put together an efficient network setup. For example, if you have a network consisting of only 802.11g devices and set up a router to only accept 802.11g connections, it'll run at around 54Mbit/sec. But, if you have a network consisting of random 802.11 devices and a router that will support several protocols going back to 802.11b, the network will default to using the slowest, most common protocol available (802.11b) and will force all connected clients to run at that speed (11Mbit/sec), regardless of each client's individual configuration. That bandwidth is then divided by every connection, making then network seem much slower than it is. By keeping the client and router hardware similarly configured, the network speeds are less likely to suffer. Your maximum network performance is limited only by the hardware you use to build it.
- Secure your network.
Make sure your network hardware is secure on both the router and client end. Set up your router to use the most powerful encryption protocols it supports and utilize MAC address detection to identify each piece of hardware on the network, so you can ensure no one outside of your client list can access your network. Also, don't use DHCP to assign IP addresses. Manually configure each client, so they have a static IP. Finally, disable SSID broadcasting. This will reduce the likelihood of a war-driver finding your network and tagging it for others to find.
- Use the latest available network protocols.
Using protocols like 802.11g or 802.11n may help to significantly improve your network speeds over older ones, but may also offer some added flexibility. Unlike the older 802.11b/a protocols, some of the newer protocols aren't limited to one broadcast frequency (2.4GHz). While the broadcast frequency of your wireless hardware has relatively little to do with your netw
8==8 Bones 8==8
How does something that doesn't work on a laptop make Linux not ready for the desktop?
Every time the wife turns on our Panasonic Genius microwave the Wifi signal tanks, not to mention the cordless phone is useless. Needless to say, we stand back from the microwave when it's on.
--
Luck is just skill you didn't know you had.
The way my house is set up, the kitchen is between the router and the conservatory. There's a bit of a distance issue, but the router is quite usable when the microwave is turned off... but because the kitchen has a hanging ceiling, and the microwave is a little on the old side, the wireless becomes completely unusable in the conservatory and dining room when the microwave is on.
The solution was to use powerline networking to extend a wired connection to the other side of the kitchen, and set up a second wireless access point there, which worked out well, because it also meant I could move the main router to a position that better covered the bedroom end of the house.
Ahh, the joys of living in a 2800sqft bungalow....
I had terrible trouble with wireless, although my house is quite small and the distances involved were usually less than 30-40 feet. Did some research and found out that most mass-market wireless won't go through a decent brick or concrete wall, is stopped pretty much dead by metal, and doesn't even like double glazing much. So you need to consider what materials your house is made of before you go shopping. If it's wood or some other lightweight material, fine. But if it's built with lots of brick and concrete and steel - maybe not.
Power line networking to the rescue! I happened to choose Devolo because it looked good quality (although relatively expensive). My problems evaporated within 24 hours, and network speeds have actually increased. I hardly ever use even Ethernet cable any more. Every mains socket is also an Ethernet socket, so I sit down with my laptop, plug in the mains cable, and plug a short length of Ethernet cable into the same socket - and I'm wired.
Of course, you can do this with a wireless acces point instead of a laptop - so pick the power point that is most convenient for where you want reception, and plug in your access point there - that lets you use your equipment in the garden.
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
The routers with auto-select on the channel select based on the interference where the router itself is, not based on the interference between your router and where you want to use wifi. I find it often chooses really bad channels for full coverage, and prefer to set it manually after walking around with a wifi analyser (which is a free app on any android phone). It won't protect against RF interference from microwaves, senders, or anything like that, but at least it'll help pick a channel that doesn't have other networks to fight with.
If you have the option, use Intel wireless. The last time I had to install drivers for my Intel wifi cards was years ago, and I have not had any problems using wifi with Intel cards on Linux ever (once the drivers were installed). No slowdowns, no sudden drops from the network, no stability issues at all. And in most laptops, it is really easy to specify an Intel wireless card... if they didn't give you a choice at the manufacturer, it's also trivially easy to replace the card with one you can get from sites like http://www.logicsupply.com/. The Intel cards tend to be more expensive, but they are worth every penny, especially if you plan on installing Linux.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16833122318&cm_re=powerline_networking-_-33-122-318-_-Product
There are many other options out there, but that's the one I am using, for exactly the purpose that the GP has suggested. No stringing wires needed at all, and throughput is plenty adequate for wifi.
That was "in-depth?"
Yes and no. If you cancel your contract within the first year (X years?) then they'll want the box back. However when I cancelled my contract with Sky after about 7 years I was left with the box to do with as I pleased. (Which in this case was dispose of the useless, failing piece of crap)
However you are correct in that getting another box to watch in another room means paying an additional monthly fee; as far as I know there's no option to just buy the box outright and pay no extra for the service. That is simply out and out greed, and is why I will never do it.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
"stringing wires through finished construction" might cost a bit, but it is not difficult at all
Depends on what your walls are made of; here in the UK most of them are brick. Straightforward yes, but "not difficult" it most certainly is not.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Just avoid Broadcom at all costs, they're a total crapshoot (I didn't even know Realtek made wifi adapters though). Even on my sister's Dell Mini 10v that CAME WITH LINUX ON IT, the Broadcom drivers have been broken through various distro upgrades. I managed to get some backported drivers to work on Lucid. I could not get a valid download of Maverick at the time, but that's another story (the torrent they gave out was bad, the hash of the .iso as specified in the .torrent didn't match!)
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
NDISwrapper is a crapshoot too. It's worth a shot but it's not a sure thing. With many Broadcom adapters, NDISwrapper drivers can't connect to WPA-secured APs.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
I moved a couple boxes worth of DVDs and CDs away from my router and it has significantly improved the signal strength and reliability (it used to reboot itself fairly regularly). If I put one of those boxes on the floor in a certain place, I can completely block WiFi to the "shadowed" part of the house. Moving the router just a few inches in one direction will effectively kill the signal to my game consoles. Sometimes these little details matter.
After weeks of switching locations and settings and trying new routers, I found that Pulse Audio (on a wired computer on the network) was starting twice. Whenever an audio file was played on the offending machine, the dual PA servers would suck bandwidth from the router. It wasn't noticeable on the only other wired machine in the house, but the effect on the wireless machines was complete and utter loss of bandwidth, even though the signal-strength indicators remained high.
XKCD:Xeric Knowledge Comically Dispen
Trolling the internet (with broken wifi) to figure out ndiswrapper and hack it into life does not qualify as "working" for most people. The alternatives (windows, mac), "just work".
Yes, I've made wireless work under linux (and FreeBSD too, this isn't a linux exclusive) when i had to as well, but it shouldn't have to be fucking around with that shit.
And yes I'm aware of the reasons. End users don't care, they just know their shit doesn't work.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Apples and Oranges.
Your typical End users just buy a box and expect it to all work. Less than 1/1000th of one percent ever install an OS of any kind. Ever! If it breaks, they take it somewhere.
If you ever purchased a linux machine (Dell and HP sell them or have sold them in the past) they worked out of the box. 100%.
So lets keep the comparison on a level playing field, and not handicap one OS by requiring it be installed on bare metal by a novice while the other OS goes home from BestBuy pre-installed.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Thanks for the info. That just reinforces the need to do a survey with a wifi analyzer. I have an Android phone now after the Alltel to AT&T switch (so far, it is not too bad of a service for me but others in the area have dumped their service for Verizon which is the only other choice). I will have to get that app so I don't have to lug the laptop around as much for that purpose.
I Cater to the Needs of Stupid People. - from a coffee mug Christmas gift
You buy your satellite STB. I don't know why anyone would put up with overpriced cable crap.
The FTA satellites have got all the same channels as FTA terrestrial, except you stand a chance of receiving it more than 50 miles from a city. For a lot of people in remote areas it's the only way of getting off-air TV.
Probably because if the box is seven years old, it's already obsolete and they are distributing the successor model now.
Pretty cool for not requiring any software installation. http://meraki.com/tools/
You cannot warp because you are warp scrambled.
Have you filed a bug report? That's probably a rare enough setup that few people have tried to do it.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
I have found many bug reports that match what I would file, they have been in there for years, but are never deemed important enough to action. Unfortunately I'm not enough of a programmer to help though.