On 2010-07-12, at 08:20, Michael Sweeney wrote: > Right now we always lose connection, even standing next to the router we > often have poor signal strength. I fear it’s all due to interference from the > multiple access points in our office building and other things. > > Can anyone recommend a good wireless router, G/N MIMO that should give us > better coverage than an old Linksys G router. > > We are in an office building, it’s pretty wide open, all concrete, we’re on > the 11th floor, and with Netstumbler I’ve detected 96 other access points… > I’m sure if I walk around the office again, I’ll break the 100 mark. > > I was looking into the CISCO AirNet’s, but I’m worried about forking over $1k > and still having the same problems.
Wireless can be tricky, since over time and even during the span of a day, interference and the amount of people using your AP can affect the performance. Things we need to know is: How many people are planning to use and connect to it concurrently? What's the surface area you need to cover? What obstacle are there? Concrete support beams? Meeting rooms? Any insulation or sound proofing for the meeting or office rooms? Hows the ceiling, open with venting ducts? You can a WiSpy wifi analyzer to see the interefence there might be (2.4 ghz phones, microwave, all sorts of wireless gadgets...). But if you don't suspect any of that type of interference except for other Access Points, you can just rely on your laptops, wifi adapter. In general you want to keep a 3 channel difference with nearby APs. Usually your want to use channels 1, 6 or 11 since they're all 3 channels away from each other. Also those enterprise solutions (I forgot the features for Airnet), but they usually won't offer better transmission power or even control over the different radio settings (I find dd-wrt is better for tweaking these things). An enterprise solution is more geared towards offering the possibility to manage multiple SSIDs with multiple antennas on different channels, that transmit the same SSIDs and allowing a user within the office to walk around and jump from antenna to antenna without losing its association (i.e. using a wifi voip phone). If you're only looking at using one wifi router, look into getting ddwrt compatible router. Also few things to keep in mind, a wifi (802.11g) router runs on 54 mbps, it's essentially a hub, since that 54 mbps bandwidth is shared with all the other users and I believe it's also half-duplex. So having a lot of simultaneous transfers from multiple clients will affect everyone's bandwidth. Also to increase coverage, you can use lower speeds then 54 mbps. One other thing I;ve noticed is that with iPhones, to improve performance, you want to increase the rate at which beacons are sent out. For some reasons, iPhones seem sensitive to that. By any chance you wouldn't be in the building in front of Rosemont metro? I'm asking because I know there are tons of SSIDs there. More than other places if seen downtown. > > > Thanks! > _______________________________________________ > mlug mailing list > [email protected] > https://listes.koumbit.net/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mlug-listserv.mlug.ca
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