OT strange wifi disconnection

Neighbours microwave heating their TV dinner for 10 mins at reduced power?

Neighbour's microwave oven?

SteveW

Have you checked that the channel you are using does not conflict with other local WiFi routers? Could be activity by your neighbours swamping your signal.

Or it could be a netgear router. Flakiest heap of s**te its ever been my displeasure to waste days on before finally tossing in the skip...

Could well be interference of some sort. Have you tried changing channels on the WiFi?

Buy an ethernet cable, bypass the wifi and see if it still happens

Chances are quite high it's a microwave oven that is causing the problem.

In article , Mentalguy2k8 scribeth thus

More than likely these days. Have a look for netstumbler or similar and scan around for the culprit which can even be a leaky microwave oven;!...

Which won't show up on that tho...

Thanks everyone for the replies. I've tried changing channel (I've got an app on my phone that shows what channels the neighbours are using & changed it to one that wasn't being used but no change).

Must be a microwave or something, not much I can do about it!

Recently had similar issues with my mother's iPad. Cured with a new router running 802.11n as opposed to 802.11g that the old router used. Worth checking what protocol your router is running.

Tim

Just changed to a SuperHub from the old style 'modem' and so far it seems O.K. Like you, Vista on a laptop.

I have a similar ap on my Android phone and I have noted that the signal strength does apparently go up and down for no obvious reason.

I see peaks appear and disappear on various channels, and different APs show as the strongest signal. This may well be the APs bumping up signal strength when sending data or when seeing errors in data, but I am guessing here.

As you say, from the symptoms it looks like interference from a non-WiFi source.

Have you tried moving the SuperHub around? Difficult without a piece of coax to extend the reach, but it should be simple to make up an extender.

Also, where is the SuperHub located? I assume that you would know if a microwave or other device in your house would be operating at the time of the problem, so presumably we are looking at next door and considering the inverse square law. How close is you closest neighbour? Is it possible that there is a device quite near you but through a wall? Moving the router a small amount might reduce the interference a lot. You could even consider papering a wall in tinfoil (assuming that like tinfoil hats this keeps harmful rays away) :-)

Oh, and just to rule out Windows management of WiFi, how about dual boot into Linux to see if you get the same symptoms with a different OS?

Cheers

Dave R

I get exactly this problem from a "Super-Hub". It was fine with the old setup, now the speed can vary wildly..

Is there any particular advantage in having one of these SuperHub thingies? We've got a standard cable modem and an Apple Airport Extreme. Works for us. What are we missing out on? (Other than tales of woe! :-) )

Older modems allegedly not as good over 20Mbits/sec If you go above that they tend to upgrade you to a SuperHub.

Might be worth knocking on neighbours doors when the thing dies to see if they are using their microwave. It might have duff/dirty door seals and be leaking RF rather a lot. See other comment about microwave just the other side of wall from AP though.

Or it might be a Panasonic Inverter type - mine, even when newish, used to spew enough s**te from the electronics to kill WiFI - and I had already been over it with a leakage detector.

Thats precisely what we've done. Just use the VM device as a modem and thats followed with a "proper" Draytek router;)...

Yep, same problem here with a Panasonic Inverter combi. Can't detect any leakage (albeit with an ancient tester that must be 25 years old and was last calibrated 20 years ago)

Wifi was failing every time the microwave was used.