so desparate I placed an add in the paper

nreynol

Call me lazy, call me just plain old, but I need to find somebody, some firm, some consultant who can come and set up a WiFi for me. The frustrating thing is that I had it set up once.

I am willing to pay for the service but I just cannot find anybody who will come out and look at the problem - obviously I am looking in the wrong places. Unlike other computer problems I cannot pick up the WiFi network and take it into a shop.

Can anybody point me in the correct direction - please?

THe History
Dec 03 I installed Eircom broadband in the house. I got it working through the modem they supplied. No problem.

I next installed a D-LINK wireless ADSL router with 4 cable connections as well.

I have 4 laptops 3 of them have wireless cards and I created a wireless network and had 2 wireless laptops connected and 1 connected by wire.

After 3 days the network degraded it took for ever for the laptops to find the network and then they were incredibly slow.

As I use the 1 laptop that is not wireless for work I disconnected the D-LINK wireless ADSL router and reverted back to the modem supplied by Eircom and this manner of connecting 1 at a time has been successful for the past 12 months.

Once again I would like to try and get the wireless network back up and running. I need help to do it.

secret_squirrel

You should be able to take at least one your pc's and the router into a shop - unless its enviromental conditions your are expiriencing. You shouldnt even need a DSL connection if the router is operating in gateway/switch mode.

Having said that Im setting up a D-Link ADSL router for a friend at the mo and its proving a pig to set up without actually connecting to my ADSL.

Also some thoughts for you. Did you buy any electronics when your network started degrading.

Candidates could include - cordless phones, video senders, microwaves. Basically anything that could interfere with the 2.4 Ghz band. Also if you look around for other wireless networks - do any others appear? They might be operating on too close a band to you.

happydude13

try installing netstumbler on the laptops

see what the graph shows for the signal levels

mickot

What modem did Eircom supply you with?

If it is a Cayman/Netopia or similar, best not to use another ADSL router, just get an access point and plug it into one of the network ports. I usually set the access point to a fixed IP address as I have found the DHCP sometimes erratic.
Because you have laptops it is usually easy to get a connection to the wireless network and walk around the house watching for signal drops etc. I recently had a extension built with 5 RSJs in it and lost my wireless signal in that end of the house.
For pig-iron I got another access point from a different manufacturer and wired it to my first access point just to see if they would work - no problem and I can roam between the two, but is it inportant to set the access points to 2 different channels at least 2 apart - I use 1 and 6.
My set up is:
Eircom Broadband with a Netopia/Cayman
1 Belkin ADSL wireless router configured as access point only with a fixed IP address wired to router
1 3Com Office connect access point wired to router
1 PC with Corega WiFi PCI card with external aerial
1 Dell notebook with Centrino WiFi
1 Notebook with Hawking technology PCMCIA WiFi card
1 Notebook with Lucent/Orinoco WiFi Card I salvaged out of a broken Apple Airport base station.

All work no problem, except after I installed XP SP2 on the PC it totally freaked and it took an age to get it back onto the wireless network. I had to give it a fixed IP address for some obscure reason, but at least the notebooks can pick up a DHCP address.

So, if eircom supplied you with a Cayman/Netopia we should be able to work something out

-micko

exactiv

I don't know if I'm allowed to say this here, but I do wireless networks on a semi-professional basis. I'm in the Cork area and would be happy to call out. Send me a private message and I'll reply with my contact details.

-exactiv

DemoniK

Hi,

You've made no mention of the mix of cards, or the router type so will assume at least 1 of the laptops is 11b.

If this is indeed the case then everything will drop to that speed no matter what you have.

I would agree with secret_squirrel. It's probably interference either with other equipment, or other Access Points (AP).

With Wifi you can put your AP on 1 of 11 channels. Thing is that only 3 of them are actually isolated form each other 1, 6 or 11. If you're on channel 1 and another AP is on channel 3 you actually overlap 50% of your bandwidth. (same with 6 and 3). You should do a scan of your surrounding area and see if there are any other APs nearby. If so look at the channels and select yours to be 1 of the 3 above that isn't being used. If all 3 are being used things get a little more complicated and you may need to figure out who owns the other APs and ask them to turn down their power.

Basically each channel will give you the bandwidth to get 11 Mbps (for 11b) on your network. But due to interference, overheads for 802.11, the real bandwidth is 5Mbps which is shared between all the equipment connected to that network. If another network overlaps your channel then you will be sharing your 5Mbps with them (actually is much worse, but would take too long to explain).

Also - noise from bluetooth, DECT phones, microwaves will also eat into your bandwidth.

As for the DLINK router - I have a DSL-G604T which I updated to the new firmware released in August and haven't had any trouble in setting it up and it's being running 24/7 since September (when I got activated). The one thing I did notice with it was that if I had the router shoved in a corner there was some interference occuring and the strength of the signal throughout the rest of house dropped >30%. Moving the router 2 foot out form the corner (along one of the walls) improved reception immensly.

-RikD.