[HOW TO] Diagnose Wireless Issues

p9ul

I currently use a wireless connection to my router (Orange/Wanadoo Livebox) for everything in my house - (PC, Laptop, 360, PS3, DSi, iPhone x2) would this guide be beneficial to me to see if I could make any improvements?

My main area of concern is the connections to my game consoles (in another room to the router), can tinkering with the channel settings improve things like connection speeds or ping?

For info - I live on a housing estate in a rural area (about 3.5mb DL speeds at best) and my kit will usually "see" 4 or 5 of the neighbours networks. My router is also quite old dating from 2005, it does not support wireless N and I wonder if upgrading would be beneficial.

Iccz

It certainly wont harm to have a look, Paul.

The software is free and it only takes 10 minutes to do a full scan and get a feel for what is happening, so I would say give it a shot and see how your results look - if there are a lot of neighbouring networks sharing the same channel you can try changing your wireless channel and see if you notice any difference. You can always change back if not. You have nothing to lose

p9ul

I ran inSSIDer last night and channels don't seem to be a problem for me - mine was using 1 whereas all my neighbours were on 9.

my signal strength didn't look to clever though - it was rated at about -64. Can I improve this somehow?

mickevh

You mentioned you're concerned with gaming and ping time (latency.) In a typical home network, I would think the quality of your broadband service would have a (much) bigger influency on online gaming than the wifi performance. You may be looking in the wrong place (wifi) if you're getting laggy gaming.

To improve wifi signal strength all you can really do is move closer to the AP's, either by moving your clients closer to the AP, of putting up more AP's closer to the clients.

However, before throwing money at the problem, I'd try setting up a PC cabled to your network somewhere and run some continuous ping against your (wifi) gamestations wherever it is you typically use them and see what the response is like. If such local ping times are good (ie not involving the broadband link) then you can infer that wifi isn't the cause of any gaming issues, and you should look to the broadband service instead.

evilbunny

Sorry to have to say this, but:

This is a common mathematical error: the numbers quoted are all negative, so -48 is bigger than -93, not smaller. Think of it this way:  if you start with a suitably large number, such as 200, and subtract 48, you'll end up with a larger result than if you subtract 93.

Seems to be a good post otherwise.

Iccz

I don't follow, what was wrong with how I worded it?

swift00

-43 is much closer to the positive numbers than -93 and so -43 is bigger than -93. Think of it on a horizontal number line. The lower the number is on the line the smaller the number becomes.

Beximus

Thanks for posting that.  My internet's been fading out the past couple of weeks - connecting at 54 mbps and dropping to 1 after about 10 minutes.  I've used inSSIDer to discover my neighbours are on the next channel down.  I've changed it and touch wood, so far so good.

Great advice.

EDIT:  This seems to have worked a treat.  Fingers crossed I have no more problems there.

tom 2000

Interesting stuff even if my understanding barely scratches the surface. Due to a switchover to cable I recently installed a new Netgear Rangemax Dual Band Router. I used it with the old Netgear dongle and looked forward to hooking up a new Dualband USB Adaptor acquired from Fleabay. However signal strength is woefull with that so back to the original adaptor and to heck with Dual Band. On looking into inSSIDDER I note the PS3 is on Channel 2 whilst the router is on Channel 1 so I will have to change that when I get a chance.
I have a history of dropping the wireless connection between PC and Router and having to manually "repair".
There are no houses within hundreds of yards so it is not interference from another WiFi network.
I was hoping the new Netgear would be stronger and more stable. It is actually weaker and the jury is out on stability.

mickevh

5GHz radio energy doesn't penatrate "stuff" (walls, doors, air,) as well as 2.4GHz.

The radio frequencies used by wifi are not the "wifi" radio frequencies, they are the radio frequencies wifi uses. Other things are allowed to use the same frequencies as long as they don't exceed a defined signal strength.

In the 2.4GHz band, microwave ovens, video senders and baby monitors are oft cited as interference sources. There are even car alarm systems that use these frequencies.

In the 5GHz band, there can be some issues with interference from/with radar and to play nice, AP's are supposed to shut down and/or shunt to another channel if they detect radar.

InSSIDer only sees wifi AP's, it doesn't show these "other" interference sources, and of course it doesn't show how close any other client devices are. Still, for a free tool, you can't really complain.