A follow-up to my January posting about SBC's use of the 2Wire HomePortal HW1000, a 400 mW firewall / access point / DSL modem.
A new tenant moved into a building two doors down from my office. He was having other computer troubles, so I helped him out. He has SBC DSL. I asked him if he took them up on their "get a free wireless AP" sign-up offer; he said "no". In fact, because they'd sent the wrong equipment the first time, he'd talked to customer support at least once to get a new modem, and they'd asked him if he wanted wireless and again he said "no". He's a mortgage company so he wanted to avoid wireless for security reasons. I've got an old Linksys WAP-11 with a 15 dB omni on the roof feeding a few nearby clients. Since he moved in, I've been having trouble with those clients: dropped packets, increased latency, etc. A walk around the block with MiniStumbler found a strong WEP'd "2WIRE734" source on channel 6 outside his office. It could be the apartments above. I'm getting the same signal strength from my AP as from this one, even two buildings away. I decided to switch all my equipment to channel 11 to minimize interference. No go. It's a little better but not by much. Where it was dropping one packet in ten before, now it's 1 of 30. Later in the day his office was open. Sure enough, inside, MiniStumbler says SNR 83, -28. I jump into the web interface of the modem and dig around until I find the wireless interface's "disable" button. It's a good thing there's a disable button. He explicitly didn't want wireless and it made for a crappy day of debugging for me. - John _______________________________________________ BAWUG's general wireless chat mailing list [unsubscribe] http://lists.bawug.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless
