Wireless signal varies
June 12, 2021 8:44 AM Subscribe
What might cause a signal from a wireless router to vary in strength during the day?
This isn’t an internet issue, but hardware.
On the same device, in the same place, my signal shows strong and weak at different times; sometimes I can’t even see the network. Why?
This isn’t an internet issue, but hardware.
On the same device, in the same place, my signal shows strong and weak at different times; sometimes I can’t even see the network. Why?
WiFi analyzer is a good thing to check — could be interference from other networks!
If you do switch the channel, make sure you change it to either 1, 6, or 11 — those are the best channels for everyone to use to minimize interference.
posted by mekily at 12:17 PM on June 12, 2021 [1 favorite]
If you do switch the channel, make sure you change it to either 1, 6, or 11 — those are the best channels for everyone to use to minimize interference.
posted by mekily at 12:17 PM on June 12, 2021 [1 favorite]
As implied_otter stated, your microwave will disrupt your 2.4 GHz network. The more modern 5 GHz band is largely immune to this interference.
This was a revelation to me. I stupidly bound my router's 2.4 and 5 GHz bands into one network, allowing the router to decide how to connect to different devices. I naively did this based around hearing that the 5 GHz band didn't have quite as much range and didn't pass through drywall all that well.
When I decided I'd had enough of the microwave killing my chromecast streams, I separated the bands into two different networks, and popped everything but my printer into the 5 GHz network. Having seperated the networks, I've never been happier with my router. Everything is more reliable now and the microwave doesn't disrupt everything all the time. The range and wall interference issues I heard about haven't been a problem.
As for another story of why wifi seems like it's dying, I had to replace a router whose wifi would slowly die as it was being used, to the point that it became unable to transmit wifi data. Using a wifi analyzer, I noticed that its power would degrade as it was being used, despite being 10 feet from the router. I suspect a component on the wifi radio itself was failing.
Good luck in pinning down the issue!
posted by sydnius at 12:50 PM on June 12, 2021
This was a revelation to me. I stupidly bound my router's 2.4 and 5 GHz bands into one network, allowing the router to decide how to connect to different devices. I naively did this based around hearing that the 5 GHz band didn't have quite as much range and didn't pass through drywall all that well.
When I decided I'd had enough of the microwave killing my chromecast streams, I separated the bands into two different networks, and popped everything but my printer into the 5 GHz network. Having seperated the networks, I've never been happier with my router. Everything is more reliable now and the microwave doesn't disrupt everything all the time. The range and wall interference issues I heard about haven't been a problem.
As for another story of why wifi seems like it's dying, I had to replace a router whose wifi would slowly die as it was being used, to the point that it became unable to transmit wifi data. Using a wifi analyzer, I noticed that its power would degrade as it was being used, despite being 10 feet from the router. I suspect a component on the wifi radio itself was failing.
Good luck in pinning down the issue!
posted by sydnius at 12:50 PM on June 12, 2021
Great advice above. Video conference meetings have revealed WiFi and internet issues that many of us would not have noticed before. I recently moved to a new apartment and the standard router my new internet company sent me appeared to have brief instability issues that I would only notice during video meetings. Most of the time the basic routers internet companies send are not the greatest quality and a common recommendation is to purchase your own router that will likely be of much higher quality.
I could have purchased a new router but my mini desktop PC has an ethernet port and it's hard to match the stability of an ethernet cable. So in my case I went with the wired ethernet solution. If your laptop doesn't have an ethernet port, you could purchase a USB to ethernet adapter like this .
The benefits of the wired ethernet solution are: save time troubleshooting an issue that can cause difficulty for even tech experts, it's cheaper than buying a quality router, wired internet is usually the most reliable, and this will easily solve potential WiFi interference issues that may or may not be causing the problem.
posted by mundo at 2:44 PM on June 12, 2021 [1 favorite]
I could have purchased a new router but my mini desktop PC has an ethernet port and it's hard to match the stability of an ethernet cable. So in my case I went with the wired ethernet solution. If your laptop doesn't have an ethernet port, you could purchase a USB to ethernet adapter like this .
The benefits of the wired ethernet solution are: save time troubleshooting an issue that can cause difficulty for even tech experts, it's cheaper than buying a quality router, wired internet is usually the most reliable, and this will easily solve potential WiFi interference issues that may or may not be causing the problem.
posted by mundo at 2:44 PM on June 12, 2021 [1 favorite]
I recently used WiFi Analyzer on Android to diagnose some interference issues because the neighbors had set up some networks that interfered. I adjusted the channels on mine to avoid overlap.
Home networking can be weird. Through a process of elimination I recently found out that simply turning on my treadmill completely killed my powerline network connection.
posted by idb at 3:16 PM on June 12, 2021
Home networking can be weird. Through a process of elimination I recently found out that simply turning on my treadmill completely killed my powerline network connection.
posted by idb at 3:16 PM on June 12, 2021
Home networking can be weird
and the further it departs from devices solidly and unambiguously wired together with cables designed specifically for moving data at high speeds, the weirder it gets, and half the time the workarounds that have been added to address some of that weirdness just add additional failure modes that make things even weirder. Use Ethernet on as many devices as you possibly can. Flat Cat 6 might help you get it to places you hadn't previously considered feasible.
One fairly common cause of variable wifi signal strengths is routers that are set to pick their wifi channel automatically. They generally do this on the basis of dynamically monitoring their radio environment and switching to the channel where they're seeing the least interference, but if you've got multiple routers all able to detect each other's activity, especially if they're from different manufacturers, the result is often a chaotic game of channel hopping Tag that occasionally results in a couple of them just trying to blast each other out of the sky for minutes at a time.
Using a wifi analyzer manually to see what's around, and then fixing your own router's 2.4GHz radio to channel 1, 6 or 11 depending on which of those sees the least competition from elsewhere, will calm this down both for you and for anybody else whose router might have been fighting with yours for Total Spectrum Dominance.
In the 5GHz band you have more non-overlapping channels to choose from but there are additional rules that make the choice more complicated. This explainer is pretty good.
posted by flabdablet at 11:33 PM on June 12, 2021 [1 favorite]
and the further it departs from devices solidly and unambiguously wired together with cables designed specifically for moving data at high speeds, the weirder it gets, and half the time the workarounds that have been added to address some of that weirdness just add additional failure modes that make things even weirder. Use Ethernet on as many devices as you possibly can. Flat Cat 6 might help you get it to places you hadn't previously considered feasible.
One fairly common cause of variable wifi signal strengths is routers that are set to pick their wifi channel automatically. They generally do this on the basis of dynamically monitoring their radio environment and switching to the channel where they're seeing the least interference, but if you've got multiple routers all able to detect each other's activity, especially if they're from different manufacturers, the result is often a chaotic game of channel hopping Tag that occasionally results in a couple of them just trying to blast each other out of the sky for minutes at a time.
Using a wifi analyzer manually to see what's around, and then fixing your own router's 2.4GHz radio to channel 1, 6 or 11 depending on which of those sees the least competition from elsewhere, will calm this down both for you and for anybody else whose router might have been fighting with yours for Total Spectrum Dominance.
In the 5GHz band you have more non-overlapping channels to choose from but there are additional rules that make the choice more complicated. This explainer is pretty good.
posted by flabdablet at 11:33 PM on June 12, 2021 [1 favorite]
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There could also be other networks around you that are only on at some times of the day. Here's a decent WiFi Analyzer app for Windows that could help you figure out if that's happening. On Mac there's a built-in WiFi scanner that you can access by following the instructions in this article.
If it does turn out to be interference from other networks, it might make sense to switch to a different channel or to a 5 GHz mode (which is faster but less good at wall penetration, and has a lot more channels).
posted by implied_otter at 9:01 AM on June 12, 2021 [4 favorites]