So with the help and advice of some on here I massively improved our WiFi situation at work, got a phone app to see signal/channel strength, shifted stuff about and faffed with the router channels.
But, and it could be coincidence but it's looking right, things fare much better when the guy in the shop next door isn't in. I noted it was generally better after 5.30 and he's been open sporadically of late and it's great when he's shut.
Now I'm going to run a cable and be done with it but just out of curiosity, if it is a problem coming from next door, what could it be?
The strip lights in his shop would be my first guess.
The most effective mobile phone jammer I ever saw was a friends switched mode charging base of a particular now very long in the tooth BT phone. It was only when the thing was retired that it became obvious that the poor mobile reception in his kitchen was due to this contraption. I had always blamed the boiler ignition sparks which is also in there.
An arc welder or other source of broadband RF interference up into the GHz band will also cause you trouble. If he has signal boosting amplifiers or test gear operating it might cause some issues.
Wifi is generally fairly robust unless the signal levels are marginal or you are fighting someone else on the same channel(s).
Wifi is a shared medium. If you're on the same channel, you're sharing bandwidth. If he makes lots of traffic, your available bandwidth goes down.
2.4GHz is also shared with Bluetooth, Zigbee, microwaves, and other things, so it can get quite congested.
The tricks (which you might already have done) are to try to be on different channels (bare in mind that his router might decide to change channel if it thinks others are clearer) and make more use of 5GHz which is less good at going through walls.
It could be much less malign! He could simply have a WiFi router and clients which are using the same channels as you are using. This will reduce throughput simply by working as it should (different networks using the same channels do time division multiplexing). If it's not working totally 'as WiFi is supposed to work' then it's likely things will work even worse.
Yup local factors play a big part. Even before looking at RF interference you have all the issues of it being a shared spectrum with relatively few channels to choose from. So areas with lots of wifi networks, and those with heavy traffic will lower performance for those around them. I have seen cases where you get very good wifi signal strength all over the place, but still get very poor throughput for these reasons.
Quite. You *do* have a basic wifi network analysing app on your phone or tablet, I trust? That will show you all the local networks, and what channels they are using.
I think wifi not working is pretty much built in to the spec. Its spread spectrum technology, so the more people are on the air, the slower your data rate is likely to be ... As I understand it the concept of a 'channel' is defeated by the spreadiness of the spectrum ..and in the end if someone else is sending a data packet, you have to wait till he has finished before you send yours..its like the old coaxial Ethernet. Packets are coded for the receiver, other people cant normally decode them or respond to them, but they have to give way to them.
Interestingly model R/C aircraft now use the same technology, so that there is no limit to how many models can fly on it...except there we were, about ten years ago, flying at the Nationals after competition hours with about a hundred models in the air when the pilot next to me said 'that's funny, the model seems to be slow to respond tonight'.....
model planes use ~ 20 Hz frame rates and send up to 10 x 10 bit quantities- servo positions. - so each plane is ~ 2000 bits per second.
100 models was about 200Kbps, well within the technology, but sadly the chances of data collisions were very high.....and a skilled pilot knows when he has missed a frame.
So I suspect what is happening is that he has dozens of phones hooked into his wifi all chattering to whatever they chatter to, and filling a large part of the spectrum, so your users have to wait their turn...
What I can't get my head around is that it is fine downstairs but largely unusable upstairs. But seemingly fine on both floors when next door isn't in?
My wireless KB/mouse is slightly problematic too, regular lag and missing keypresses. Could that be connected?
Not for iphones - only android ones. I note levels seem to vary over quite short time scales. Doe this imply out of band interference? I don't have spectrum analyser.
Maybe he has a jammer as a marketing ploy. For people who walk past and say "my phone doesn't seem to be working properly". So he plugs it into a laptop and adopts the old car mechanic / builder "Tut tut" routine.
There are sort of enough channels that you can get around it by putting neighbours onto opposite ends of the spectrum even if the modern routers grab 4 "channels" or even "8 channels" at once. If you choose unwisely then collisions and exponential backoffs are inevitable.
Most of the scanning apps will show you how many channels the spread is over for a nominal centre channel for each SSID.
If you are fighting for the same or overlapping channels then yes maybe but it shouldn't affect you otherwise.
I can only suggest you consider a Wifi Analyser app for your phone or similar for laptop, and see what SSIDs are in the vicinity and how close they are to the channels chosen by your router.
I don't believe they necessarily use the same protocol, some are proprietary. If the dongle and kb/mouse are close then this is surprising.
It could be as simple as they have a leaky microwave. Something you can suggest they change or the users risk cataracts etc!!
Always the best, but no so easy to install as wifi.
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