WiFi Signal Dropping

JBR said:

Yesterday, I got in touch with Virgin and the very helpful guy there had a look (remotely - clever eh?) at my router and informed me that a lot of customers in my area had been having problems when on Channel 6, despite there being no other apparent signals on that channel.

He changed it to Channel 11 and told me that, although they were currently doing some work on the lines in my locality that might cause some brief outages for half-an-hour or so, there should be no further problems. He also said he'd call me back after a couple of days to see if everything is now OK.

So far, neither my first wife nor I have noticed any more problems.

Perhaps you (the OP) should give Virgin a call.

Click to expand...

Will do JBR, sounds like a potential solution.

Rang Virgin and got them to change the channel from 13 to 11, so far 24hrs later seems much improved

I've since realised that you can change channels yourself. Virgin will tell you how and point you to the appropriate web page on which you can do it.

So it's been 5 days now and though there is some improvement the interference continues

Can you post up a link to that page please JBR?

Here you go mate. There are instructions here.

http://help.virginmedia.com/system/...&LANGUAGE=en&COUNTY=us&VM_CUSTOMER_TYPE=Cable

I'm not with Virgin, but they're all much of a muchness. Instructions for setting the wireless router up can usually be found on their site.

Yes, that's the advice site. I just type http://192.168.0.1 into my browser, but this site explains what to do when you have logged in.

As a network/trlecommunications engineer i suggest you not to use edg frequencies as channel 1 or 11 cause the channel bandwidth is usually narrow and the built in antenna hardware doesnt work very well in these frequencies. This problem occurs when another signal source which is known as noise (useless signal) interfers with your signal. Here we have the signal to noise ratio, which means that if you get a strong noise and your signal is fix (of course the signal strength is fix cause u use the same router), the ratio between them goes lower. Thats why you get weak signal.

So try to change to another channel like 3-4-8-9 and see if any better. Dont forget that signals are very strange things to deal with. They change their behaviour according to many physical things, like the weather, the humidity, a closed door, an electric device which produces electrical noise and many many other vectors.

One other possible thing is that somebody else uses your wifi router to connect to the internet. Someone whose connection is weak. The wifi protocol gives way to the weakest client first and then to the others. For example if my connection to your router is weak with a ping of ~500ms with many dropped packets, and your connection is strong with a ~3ms latency and no dropped packets, is you that you have to wait for me to accomplish the request/transmition and then your packet will be sent. This causes you delays and dropped packets as well, especially when i make use of all the possible bandwidth.