Intermittent connection problem while traveling

Last week while traveling and staying in a rented room, I and one of the folks with me both had laptops with Wifi capabilities. The person from whom we were renting had wireless internet and said we could use her connection. There was no security on their router. It was an always-on satellite connection. I do not know the brand or model of the router. We would always receive a GOOD or VERY GOOD signal, but often, and sometimes for hours on-end, we would both receive an "UNABLE TO CONNECT" message when trying to connect to this wireless connection, even though it showed a GOOD or VERY GOOD signal. What might explain this? The only thing that I could speculate was that her internet connection was "down." so YES, we could communicate with the router, but could not get to the Internet because she was not connected to the internet. Is this plausible? Is there a better explanation?

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Reply to
trippclark
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On Mon, 4 Feb 2008 12:22:47 -0500, trippclark wrote in :

Signal strength isn't necessarily meaningful. You may well have been defeated by wireless (radio) interference. See cause and cures of interference in the wiki below. Since you can't control the environment, your best bet is probably a directional antenna, which not only boosts signal to/from the wireless access point, but may also decrease interference from sources not along the connection path.

Easily tested by pinging the wireless router (default gateway in the connection settings).

Reply to
John Navas

That's a plausible explanation, as long as you could actually ping the local router.

Next time you're in a situation like that use the traceroute command (tracert on windows). Using that command will let you see the IP addresses (and DNS names) of hosts from you to the trace destination. It's handy to use 'tracert

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Look at the first few hops. If it's only getting to one or two, then try some other DNS name. Perhaps using some country-specific hostname. It may be your link to the router, the router's link to it's ISP or links upward from there. The recent cable outages in Egypt and Asia are prime examples of how traceroute could let you detect it. Although some hosts may not respond to it, traceroute works often enough to be useful most of the time.

The other possibility is that open router was being used by LOTS of people. A lot of users on it could cause trouble for it. It could run out of available DHCP leases; but you probably wouldn't be able to ping if that were the case. Use the 'ipconfig /all' command to see what sort of addressing you got from the DHCP server. But even if the router and DHCP server (they're often the same device on a small network) had enough addresses it's possible that other users were consuming all of the available sessions on the router. That's not something you can easily debug from your end. It's something that usually has to be debugged on the router itself, or from a wired workstation.

HTH.

-Bill Kearney

Reply to
Bill Kearney

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