Wi-fi interference in the house

[Scott Dolan]

Man, do you cats have lead lined walls, or what? My router is about a foot and a half away from the farthest back corner in our house and I get strong WiFi on all three floors, and even out at the back of our property.

[Dave Garrett]

Exactly. I couldn't stand hearing my 10-year old complain that Netflix was choppy on the iPad. We first bought a Netgear extender, but performance was too erratic (and when it was failing, you couldn't figure out why). We've since switched to an Almond, and are generally pleased. The nice thing about the Almond is it has a screen - you can actually interact with it to troubleshoot.

I hadn't heard of the Almond before, but it looks like a nice unit. Mine's a small Cisco RE1000 that plugs directly into a power outlet. It's pretty unobtrusive and despite some complaints of flakiness in the Amazon reviews, once I set it up on my network it's worked flawlessly.

Man, do you cats have lead lined walls, or what? My router is about a foot and a half away from the farthest back corner in our house and I get strong WiFi on all three floors, and even out at the back of our property.

I wouldn't be surprised if there's lead in my walls. I live in an almost 70-year-old house, and I know there's still some aluminum wiring (the previous owners replaced whatever they could get to without performing major surgery on the walls). Before getting a range extender, I flashed my router with third-party firmware that (among other things) allows the power levels of the wifi radios to be adjusted. That still didn't work in the room I need wifi in, despite my iPhone then being able to get a wifi signal almost halfway down the block. I think the real problem was that the refrigerator, microwave, washer, and dryer are all in between the router and the other end of the house. I have the range extender almost exactly at the midpoint between the router and the room in question, and that seems to be the magic spot. The signal could still stand to be a bit stronger, but it's improved significantly compared to what it used to be.

Also, I could probably improve matters further with a newer router - mine's an older model that only handles 802.11b/g, and the newer ones that are 802.11n and AC-capable would almost certainly deliver better results.

Edited August 1, 2014 by Dave Garrett

[Scott Dolan]

Actually, if you really want cutting edge, 802.11ac is where it's at.

[Dave Garrett]

^^ Yeah, that's what I meant by "AC-capable".

Looks like I'm going to be shopping for a new router sooner than expected - since Comcast's last round of speed increases, I've been getting around 35 Mbit download speeds over a wired connection, when I should be getting a solid 50 Mbit. They've just doubled speeds once again over the past couple of days in my area, so I should be getting 100 Mbit now, but I'm still at 35. Poking around online has not too surprisingly confirmed my suspicion that I'm essentially getting throttled by the inability of my elderly router to fully utilize the greater bandwidth. A newer model will fix that, and perhaps more importantly, should also significantly boost my wifi speed and range.

[Jim R]

The new modem doesn't seem any faster, by the way.

Giving credit where it's due here...

We just got an e-mail from Xfinity, with the subject line: SERVICE UPDATE: We've increased your speed! This must have been in the works for awhile, and the reason for the new modems that we received many months ago. I was instructed to use the reset button on our modem, which was quick and easy, and sure enough, it does now seem to be noticeably faster.

Edited August 6, 2014 by Jim R