Wireless internet question

Steve Carlton · 04-12-2005, 05:15 PM

How come my signal strength used to always be excellent, and now it varies from terrible to good? The Linksys 2.4 GHz "B" hub is 5 feet from my laptop. I just turned off the computer, hub, and cable modem and turned them back on and now the signal's excellent again. But this keeps happening...

dd74 · 04-12-2005, 05:21 PM

Are you near a cordless phone? They also operate on 2.4 Mhz, and can cause interference.

Steve Carlton · 04-12-2005, 05:24 PM

Nope, unless an apartment above or below me is close enough. If that was the case, why would turning everything on and off get me up to full strength?

id10t · 04-12-2005, 05:40 PM

Other signals in your area. There are 11 channels (only of which 3 don't have overlap), and microwaves, portable phones, wireless devices, etc. all share that signal space. And not just in your area - within 200-300 feet of you, depending on what the walls are made of. The AP turns on, finds a unused channel, and is good... until it gets contention for that channel and has to hop around and find one.

Try setting the channel to always be either 1 or 11 (*this* one goes to 11!) and see if that helps. If thats not it, there is a company with some "new" paint on the market that has micro particles of metal in it, which basically creates a Faraday cage out of the room if you paint all 4 walls. (no joking) Of course, your portable phone won't work in the other parts of the house...

jyl · jyl's Garage

WLAN connections are weird.

Windows reports much lower signal strengths than does the Linksys WLAN card management software.

Sometimes I see my neighbor's WLAN, sometimes I don't.

I definitely notice interference from our cordless phone (whose base station sits right next to the WLAN base station, even thgouh it shouldn't).

Will switching to a 802.11G system improve things? Our Airport base station is B/G, my work laptop is A/B/G, only our iBook is B-only and we could get a new card for it.