Wireless Internet Issues

[Scheer]

I've been having minor connection issues to my main PC for close to a year now, but it was never a big deal as I would only loose internet connection for about 30 seconds and it would only happen once or twice a day. About three months ago it started to happen a lot more often, to the point I would loose connection for a minute every half hour, so I had to do something about it. I assumed it was a faulty router and purchased a new EA2700, replacing an E2000. I did get better, but was still cutting out for about 30 seconds a few times a day, and yesterday it got drastically worse. I'm now getting about 5 minutes of uptime, then a few minutes of intermittent connection.

The router, modem, and PC have all been power cycled without any luck. The EA2700 is connected to a WAP4410N that is directly a floor below me, and I have 90-100% signal at all times. I do not think it is an issue with the computer as I have recently been using the hotspot on my phone for internet and have never ran into the issue. I started pinging the router and access point, and both of them are doing the same thing, so the problem might be with the access point... I'll be getting a new one tomorrow to see if it resolves the problem, but figured I should still post up and see if any of you had other ideas to try.

While internet is up and working, I will get <1ms to 2 ms ping to the access point, and 1ms to 10ms on the router. Right when the internet goes down, and just as it starts to go back up, I will have pings of 1 to 5 seconds, sometimes "Request Timed Out." If the internet is coming back up and I do a few pings in a row, they will get faster over a period of 15 or so seconds, until it is around 1ms. When the internet isn't working I always get "Request timed out" and a few times have seen "Reply from 192.168.1.144: Destination host unreachable." (My local IP is .144).

This is the only computer running off the access point, the rest of them are wired. I never use my tablet at home, but I have been using it occasionally to see if internet still works when this computer goes down, and the tablet will sometimes loose connection, but there are times when it will have internet when this computer won't. This made me suspect the wireless card, so I tried a USB dongle and it still looses connection.

Thanks in advanced, and let me know any other information that may help troubleshoot the issue.

 

[RealBeast]

Yeah, it sounds like typical wireless interference behavior.

There is probably another nearby 2.4GHz radio source (other network, wireless speakers, headphones, phones, baby monitors, microwaves, etc.) that is causing the interference. You can download a free app (inSSIDer) to look for other wireless signals by channel and strength and then change your channels to avoid them, or if you cannot find any consider switching to the 5GHz band. That would require 5GHz support at your router and your adapters.

 

[Scheer]

The router is dual band, but I don't have a dual band card or adapter, so I'll pry get one of those and see if it helps. I'd love to just run Cat5 to it, but it would be a lot of work.

I've used the Meraki WiFi Stumbler, and I'm on channel 2, with everything else being on channels 6, 9, and 11 so I think I'm good there. It must be a device interfering then, just not sure what it might be. Phones are 5 Ghz and the microwave is never in use when I am having the issues, the only other thing I can think of is the audio system in the living room where the access point is, but nothing there is wireless. I googled inSSIDer and saw the spectrum analyzer they have as well, so I read into it a bit and I think I'll be able to use one of our Anritsu analyzers to search around for interference.

Thanks for the help.

 

[john-b691]

Just a note, even though there are all those channel numbers really the only ones you can use with no overlap are 1,6,11. You are better off on channel 1 than on 2 because the top end is overlaping the channel 6. To make matters worse most newer router are running wide channels to get more speed so everyone is use 2 blocks. So you either get 1,6 or 6,11. It is getting so crowded in the 2.4 band

 

[RealBeast]

The router is dual band, but I don't have a dual band card or adapter, so I'll pry get one of those and see if it helps. I'd love to just run Cat5 to it, but it would be a lot of work.

I've used the Meraki WiFi Stumbler, and I'm on channel 2, with everything else being on channels 6, 9, and 11 so I think I'm good there. It must be a device interfering then, just not sure what it might be. Phones are 5 Ghz and the microwave is never in use when I am having the issues, the only other thing I can think of is the audio system in the living room where the access point is, but nothing there is wireless. I googled inSSIDer and saw the spectrum analyzer they have as well, so I read into it a bit and I think I'll be able to use one of our Anritsu analyzers to search around for interference.

Thanks for the help.

It sounds like you are well equipped to deal with the interference issue. One other option that I've used several times with success is a pair of powerline apapters (Zyxel 4205) to bypass an area and then attached a router configured as an AP at the distant location, bandwidth was acceptable but not excellent.