Intro:
I hear this a lot the WF-FI at the office – at my house etc. is really, really, slow. Slower than molasses in the winter time going uphill – really slow.
I had this customer that worked as a financial advisor in one of those fancy office buildings that have marble tile on the walls of the entry way and on the floor – you know that white tile with the black streaky lines running through it? Very nice office space.
She was a new client for me, and one of the comments she made is my wireless is always dropping. My wireless keyboards and mice will just stop working, and then I have to re-boot them. My laptops always loose connection. At first, I thought that was very odd, wireless is pretty reliable.
However, after thinking about it for a bit, and all those other people using wireless in the building, it made complete sense.
Primmer:
When thinking about wireless, it’s about the bubble and the waves. When wireless is broadcast, it’s not just in a straight line it is broadcast in something that looks like a sphere and is in about a 400-foot radius.
The waves come into play when we talk about interference patterns. The example goes like this.
When you throw a rock into a pond, it creates ripples, waves in the pond – now throw another rock into the pond close to the original rock, and you notice that where the waves intersect, they cancel out each other, a dead spot.
Now do the same rock throwing again, but this time throw one a little harder – give it more energy, and you will see that when they intersect, the wave that got more energy will keep going but will be reduced in strength. This is exactly how WI-FI interference patterns work
When you have multiple WI-FI signals transmitting on the same channel, that is the way the interference patterns setup. The WI-FI router must re-transmit the dropped data packet – dead spot in the wave – so you can receive the data. All this happens very quickly in the back ground, so you only notice is that my WI-FI is really slow – due to the re-transmit of colliding waves of other WI-FI signals around you.
The Fix is in:
Well, the next day, I brought my spectrum analyzer in. It’s specially built for reading WI-FI signals and the bandwidth frequency in use. When I turned it on, and set it to the 2.4 GHz spectrum I could read about 85 unique SSID’s in that 400-foot bubble, and I am thinking to myself no wonder.
Then I switch the unit to 5 GHz spectrum, and there were a few, but nowhere near the amount of usage especially in the lower channels.
So, I bought a new router that we could easily change the channels on, using the lower channels, and switch to only using the 5 GHz frequency. The printer she had was wireless, and only could use the 2.4 GHz bandwidth, so I hard wired the printer, put an Ethernet cable in it. I also purchased for her a wired keyboard and mouse.
I brought the new router on line configured to 5 GHz using the lower channels. Reconnected her laptops and her desktops, and everything worked faster with no lag – most importantly the stock market feeds were not dropping out. The keyboards and mice were working with no hesitation because they were wired.
So, when talking about wireless there are two other ideas that need to be mentioned and that is the Mesh and Access point concepts.
Difference between Mesh and Access points:
Mesh is the idea that you have multiple receivers around an area connected to one main point – the router. Mesh will calculate the most efficient route for the data path to travel over the mesh network to the router. Mesh may be good in some instances, however it introduces a lot of latency, slowness.
An Access Point is a wireless transmitter that is a hard wired connection back to the router. Access points are much faster, and have a much lower latency, and tend to have more features built in. I have a Fortinet Access Point in my home, and it has a few features I really like.
The Fortinet access points can have up to 8 SSID’s attached to it. So, what that means to me is when my son is getting out of line, I can change his WI-FI password without messing up the whole network. Another feature I really like is, the ability to have an off – a schedule on his SSID. His WI-FI goes off line at 10:00 PM every night. While the SSID my wife and I use are always on.
Conclusion:
If your WI-FI is like Molasses in the winter time, or your WI-FI moves so slow you think you’re probably going to start collecting social security before the next webpage comes up call us. I can come in and do an analysis for you, and help decide what the best approach is to fix the slow WI-FI.
Rick Arnold – Arnold Consulting – We hate slow WI-FI
847-464-5855
