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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...
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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My wifi was going great... until the neighbours decided to secure their network
. .
ditto. take a fluorescent bulb to microwave and shut off light sources. If the bulb starts to glow replace the microwave.
I'd have that microwave looked at, because I have no problem streaming video right next to my microwave to a wifi tablet.
Maybe you have a leak? Any appliance store has detectors, most will rent them to you.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Nothing in this story talks about Linux.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
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!
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.
What's killing your Wi-Fi? Or rather, who? *maniacal laughter*
Mini Portable Signal Jammer (Wi-Fi/GPS)
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Nachos
"I bless every day that I continue to live, for every day is pure profit."
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.
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.
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.
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. :)