@ansj64 What wireless band was your client using?

ansj64 wrote

5 ghz band. Should I switch to 2.4 ghz?

  @ansj64 I thought maybe you were using the 6GHz band, that would suffer with a wall in between.

The 5GHz band should be fine at 3m, even with a wall, there must be interference nearby or the wall itself contains stuff that interferes with the signal.

I have a satellite unit about 6m away from the main unit and it works fine, although I'm pretty sure it doesn't use the 6GHz as dedicated back haul in this case.

I would try setting the 5GHz band to 80 MHz and see if the throughput is better.

  @ansj64 Oh, you've got Ethernet backhaul to a satellite.

If the construction of your wall is causing strong interference you don't have much choice but to use Ethernet back haul to connect satellite units.

I think you said you have a unit connected via Ethernet back haul already, I would test with that before actually spending more money.

  @raven-au Unfortunately I cannot do a backhaul to the room where I am getting a weak signal.  What I will try to do is to move the satellite Deco to an area by the door and see if there will be less interference being caused by whetever is in the wall or even the surrounding area.

I do have a question though.  My wifi signal shows 4 bars or full strong signal.  But the problem is the internet speed is very unstable.  It can be as high as 300-400 MBps and then suddenly also drop down to 0-50 MBps all within a a span of a minute.  And ONLY in the area where I am having the problems.  When I am in the room with the Satellite Deco.  Everything is normal wifi signal wise and internet speed wise.  The speed is quite consistent.  

I am there assuming as you said that there is some sort of interference either within the wall OR maybe some device around the area.  But how do I check for that anyway? Will it help if I just add another deco even if not the same exact model but a cheaper lower end model but connected via mesh because I do not have any way of doing ethernet backhaul in that room where the weak signal is.  No provision was made to have ethernet jacks in that room

Thanks again for your help and interest

Antonio

  @ansj64 Right, I guess you could install a WiFi analyzer if you have an Android phone, I'm not sure if they allow these apps on the app store for iDevices but you could look.

Nevertheless all it can do is confirm there is interference by looking at the signal to noise ratio.

I'm not sure why you see a strong signal but poor throughput nevertheless what you see is hard to avoid

and that's similar to what I have seen too.

You could try the 2.4 GHz band by using the client preferences option in the app but the link speed wil

be somewhat less than you could get with the 5GHz band.

I don't know if repositioning the satellite you have will help, it might, it's worth a try.

One thing to keep in mind is the position of the satellite, try a few different positions, sometimes a

few centimeters can make a surprising difference so it's worth experimenting.

There is the possibility that the Deco wireless drivers are better than the drivers of the client device

your using and you might get adequate speed doing this, you just need to experiment.

If this did help and you think adding an additional satellite is what you need then you need to think

more about that too since there are other considerations when the speed of your connection is

not so great to start with.

About position, I had a TV in my bedroom that was getting a poor signal, I couldn't play movies and

sometimes even getting an address was a problem but sometimes it was ok. It was about 3-4m from

a satellite in another room, similar to what your seeing.

But I knew what the problem was, the position I needed to place the TV was such that there was a

(brick) wall more or less parallel to the direction of the satellite which made it look to the wireless like

there was a very think wall between the TV and the satelite. For example if there is a 10 cm thick wall

that the wireless signal must pass through but it is at a 10 degree angle then that 10 cm looks more

like 100 cm to the wireless. Anyway, the TV was a bit old and replacing it fixed the problem but before

I did that I used an inexpensive Fire TV and placed it as far in front of the TV as I could (several

centimeters) so that the wall looked thinner to the wireless and that was adequate.

Obviously the same thing applies to the position of satellites!

ansj64 wrote

It seems your initial recommendation of changing the 160 Mhz bandwith to 80 Mhz bandwidth did the trick. So as you correctly surmised, it was probably interference fromm a lot of sources, including maybe the wall between one room to the adjacent room. The speed is still a bit slow but I think good enough for phone browsing. I would still like to analyze the area to see what other thing could be causing the interference. I have been checking wifi analyzers but it seems I am not getting the right app as all it cxan give me are speed tests. Or maybe because I am using a non paid subscription so some of the features are off. ANyway, At least now I have an idea and you have certainly pointed me in the right directions. Cheers! and Thank you very much!

  @ansj64 that's great to hear.

The situation does sound unusual and if changing to 80 MHz helped then it could be whether radar in your area causing a problem but just in one room is really odd and is usually not the case for the wireless channels being used in this case.

But you might find the explanation of why this is a problem interesting.

If radar is allowed to be used in the channels in use by the router, the router must scan the channels regularly so it knows what channels are being used by the radar and if it sees a radar on a channel that's being used by the router it must change the channel used immediately and not even scan that channel for a period of time.

So, although it should be seamless, it leads to constant disconnects and odd speed problems.

It would be really odd if some other device in that room looked like radar to the router and is causing these problems ...