Wireless internet question
 

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...

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

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?

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...

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.