Few questions from a newb...

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slosuenos
slosuenos's picture
Few questions from a newb...

Hey Friends, I'm running a Netgear WNR3500v2/U/L with DD-WRT v24-sp2 (06/08/11) stdkong - build 17140M. WAN is Charter 25 down, 3 up. I'm in a crowded apartment complex and I've been having some terrible problems with wireless performance, and I've managed to fix it, but I don't understand why.

First of all, I've been getting terrible signal quality. With all wireless settings set to default, and wireless mode set to n-only and channel set to 1 (least used), even a meter away, my laptop, phone, or ipad would register at about 75, and going into the next room about 40 feet away it would dip down to 25. Rate would bounce all over the place, and even in the same room as the router, streaming netflix wasn't possible with the constant buffering and freezeups. I tried every setting I could read about, and nothing helped. Then out of frustration, I set the channel to Auto, and that helped immensely! Signal is always much stronger and rate stays high. But what's odd is that throughout the day, the device bounces around to a variety of different channels automatically - especially to the ones I thought it wasn't supposed to use. For example it often sets itself to 8. I'm not complaining, but is this screwing up my neighbors? Why would the device let itself use channels that aren't supposed to be used? Is this ok?

Second issue is throughput. While setting the channel to auto really seemed to stabilize things, my devices would benchmark at about 10MBs down a meter from the router and 1-2MBs down in the next room. I read the disabling WMM could really help, but after doing that, my iPad couldn't connect, though my phone and laptop could. QoS was enabled on the device with uplink and downlink speeds properly set, and no priorities configured. I re-enabled WMM, and disabled QoS, and boom my wireless speeds went through the roof! The iPad does about 17MBs down a meter from the device, and 12MBs down in the next room. Upload speeds improved about 15%. I can stream anything now, where as before I couldn't even stream audio without constant interuptions. So again, not complaining, and very happy to finally have this usable. But, what's up with this?

Thanks much,

slosuenos

neogeo
neogeo's picture
Perhaps a Tool like this

Perhaps a Tool like this would can help you
http://www.metageek.net/products/inssider/

And remember a WLAN uses more than one channel. If your neighbor uses channel one you can't use channel two, better choose channel 10.

slosuenos
slosuenos's picture
Thanks Neogeo. Yes, I use

Thanks Neogeo. Yes, I use inssider, and several similar tools, but they haven't really helped with this issues above...

slosuenos