Network load of idle systems

Your best bet is probably to avoid the channels with the strongest signals (for both access point and client radios), not necessarily the most access points.

Wi-Fi is designed to coexist, and has enough capacity that even degraded performance tends to be faster than broadband Internet and thus not a bottleneck.

Near zero.

SSID broadcast from access points, but the load is minor.

I did some check with netstumbler. All other AP are 20-30Db weaker then my AP.

Wim

To the OP, hopefully you live in an area where using channel 13 is allowed, i.e., not in the US.

802.11g is probably still dominant, with a max throughput of about 24 Mbps. It doesn't take much interference or congestion to cut that in half or even less. Meanwhile, many ISP's are selling service at the 8-16 Mbps level, with some plans being higher, (such as 22 Mbps with bursting to 30 Mbps in my case), not to mention the new DOCSIS 3 service tiers that are beginning to roll out with 50 Mbps service, and announcements/rumors of doubling and quadrupling that.

Be careful when saying, with a broad stroke, that wireless is faster than broadband Internet.

It's nonetheless rare for wi-Fi to be an actual bottleneck: * Super-speed broadband is still relatively rare. * Wi-Fi usually runs fast enough for even super-speed broadband. * Speed tends to be limited by remote servers to less than super-speed (something ISPs probably count on).

Thanks for the warning, but channel 13 is allowed here (Netherlands).

I agree with that. My line is 10Mbit ADSL, but there are some cable companies offering 80Mbit here. And VDSL2 is starting its roll-out (but slowly).

Wim

Watch your router speeds. Most routers are not able to pass

80Mbits/sec wired or wireless. The best you can do via wireless 802.11g is about 25Mbits/sec. See table at:

When a wireless router is idle, you'll have 10 tiny SSID broadcasts every second. The load is negligible. If you're tied to large number of machines, via a switched network, you'll see a substantial number of broadcast packets from the machines, such as ARP requests.

Finding a blank channel is going to be difficult. Landing between two channels is a bad idea because you'll get some interference from both channels. Also, the strongest signal is not the best criteria. A stong nearby signal, but which doesn't pass much traffic, doesn't create anywhere near as much interference as a weaker signal, that's on all the time. The problem is that few utilities show how much traffic is moving by SSID. Fortunately, Kismet does (Pkts column). Run it all day and the channel with the fewest packets would be a good start.

Only if you stretch the definition of rare so that it has a bit of overlap with common.

I don't know what Super-speed broadband means to you, but Comcast's basic service, to use a large ISP as an example, is 12 Mbps. Time Warner's Roadrunner is similar, if not identical. It's not at all rare for a WiFi connection to drop below that rate in the face of congestion and interference. The ironic thing is that you'd be arguing my side, and have in the past, if you had brought it up instead of me.

I run into that less and less as the weeks go by. These days, it seems to be limited to a few of the open source repositories. All of the more mainstream sites allow full speed downloads, at least in my experience.

In general, but I have seen high interference cases where it produced better results than being on the standard channels (1, 6, 11).

The important part there is "all day" (including all night) because you might otherwise miss periods of heavy traffic, and even that might not be enough if (say) someone is simply out of town, which is why I generally recommend going for the standard channel with the weakest signals, and only investigating further if performance proves to be a problem.

I've got T/W in WNY, and typically saturate my full 10mbps d/l speed using only 2 d/l threads from GigaNews.