Urban area "congestion"

Irish Steve

Had an interesting one last night, friend of mine is having problems with his home broadband, and on going over to check out what was/is happening, it was very clear, and there's not a lot I can do to help him.

He's on a modern estate in Ashbourne, 3 storey terrace house, the router is on the ground floor at the bottom of the stair, so surrounded by concrete block walls, and by the time the signal gets to the third floor, there's not a lot left, and at that level, it's competing with 10, yes, Ten other wireless routers, and the signal strength of some of them is pretty strong, so he's struggling to get through to his own router, even though it's the best of the bunch.

What then makes it worse is that at least 2 of the routers are plastering their signal across 7 channels.

The initial issues were problems with security, and problems with stability.

The security was simple, albeit worrying, someone had completely turned off the wireless security, AND the firewall, so the router was wide open to any and all, which was not clever. It's an Eircom router, and the user SSID had been changed, so it wasn't Eircom that did that, someone else had been at it, and left it totally open. That was changed pretty rapidly.

The next issue was more difficult to analyse, they were using a couple of the mains power network adapters to get the signal up to the first floor, and the device up there kept locking up, which eventually turned out to be a signal quality issue with the mains units, I had a long network cable with me, and with the device hard wired, there were no problems, but with the mains bridges connected, the device just was not stable.

What it is about developers that they don't put network cable into modern houses? This location is a late Celtic Tiger development, and the total lack of cabling or ducting for anything, phones, networks or satellite dish wiring is appallingly bad, given the number of people that are installing these services.

The short term answer for my friend will be to run an additional phone extension cable up to the first floor, and move the router, so that it can be cable connected by a short network cable to the device there, and that will also then provide a distance boost to the signal on the third floor.

Long term is not so easy, ideally the house would be cabled for fixed networking, but that's easier said than done, so the options are limited.

Not a good scenario for getting quality broadband, especially for mobile devices that are primarily wireless devices.

bk

Yes, it has been widely recognised by the high speed broadband industry that the quality of wireless and networking in peoples homes is becoming a major issue.

Often the speeds sold by high speed ISPs (200mb/s, etc.) far outstrip what people can actually achieve on their wifi.

Another issue is that in the past, ISP's never imagined that there would be so many wifi devices in peoples homes and wifi wasn't really designed to handle this well.

Fortunately 802.11ac goes a long way to resolving these issues, both theoretically offering speeds of up to 6Gb/s and also importantly handling multiple clients at the same time well.

I look forward to seeing ac become ubiquitous and ISP's hopefully selling good quality ac routers.

As to your point about homes not being wired, I totally agree, government regulations should require that all new builds be wired with gigabit ethernet cable. And that regulation should have been in place the last ten years.

Fortunately not all builders were so shortsighted and cheap, my apartment is a celtic tiger one and it has two gigabit ethernet ports in every room And I've been in many other apartments like that.

As to your friends particular issue, yes moving the router to the middle flower is a good idea. They could also try running a single ethernet cable to the floor above and below and hang a wireless repeater off the end of it. Alternatively they could try getting new ethernet over power adaptors that might work better.

Another option would be to upgrade the router to a dual band 802.11ac model which might also give better performance. I guess the Eircom is an old crappy, 802.11g only model.