Four Feet to a Better Wireless Experience
For a very long time I got used to my average wireless performance in my apartment. In general, average for me meant 800 kb/s top download speed from a good internet site for a large file, and about 2 mb/s between computers local to my home network.
Then, about a year ago, those averages dropped once in a while. Sometimes the Internet speed would drop to a sustained 400 kb/s for an hour or two and the local speed would hover around 1 mb/s. In general, it wouldn’t happen often...or better yet, I wouldn’t notice it often because I don’t do a lot of large file transfers locally or over the Internet.
About three months ago, I started to notice that my general browsing speeds were sluggish. A few tests with dslreports confirmed that my connection was horrible.
With the help of iStumbler, I noticed that the amount of WiFi connections in range of my apartment had gone way up in the years since I first get a wireless router. Taking into account that most WiFi routers used channel 6 as their default, I switched my channel to 1, which had the least amount of interference from other WiFi devices near it. For a while, it was much better.
A few weeks ago, things got worse...really worse. I was losing packets all the time, and a ping using a wireless device on my network to the router would average about 500ms, when it should be under 10ms (under 2ms really). Something had to be done.
I made sure that all wireless card drivers were updated, tried different cards, and even a different router. Nothing helped.
As I was sitting in my living room, getting completely frustrated that I couldn’t solve the problem, and staring at the two different WiFi routers that exhibited the same problems, it sort of dawned on me that it doesn’t help the situation that I placed the routers so close to all the electronic equipment on my desk.
It took about 10 minutes for me to move the router from on top of the desk, to the floor under the desk, but when I did, BAM!, everything was back to normal, and by “normal” I mean sub-millisecond response time for pings on my local LAN, as well as good response time from sites out on the Internet.
I guess I really should have done that move earlier.
