Wifi Latency

I've been having some ongoing problems with the wifi connection in my house. I've expereinced consistant latency, and it seems to have gotten to the point where viewing any image-intensive page breaks the connection so that I can't resolve any pages, and sometimes my networks SSID disappears completely from the list of available network. It'a happened on various systems in the house, even when we're in the same room, and we've replaced both the modem and the router. It's seemling like it's gotten worse, but my wife tells me it's always been bad, and I just don't see it as much since I'm not home during the day.

I moved my desktop out to the living room (where the router is) and plugged my desktop directly into the cable modem via the network cable, and it works fine. There are no firmware updates available for the router I'm using, but it seems like it was a problem even before. Any thoughts?

snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com hath wroth:

My thoughts? Sure:

Thought #1. Why didn't he bother disclosing the hardware? Must be a secret installation.

Thought #2. Hmmm... No numbers anywhere in sight. Must be someone unfamiliar with netowrk diagnostics.

Thought #3. I wonder if the image intensive content (what's that?) works with a direct CAT5 ethernet connection? Could be that some of the other computers are busying out the connection. Perhaps he's running some file sharing software all day long?

Thought #4. I wonder if it's an interference problem? Has he tried other channels? If it happens with all the other computers, and the wireless router has been replaced, perhaps the interference is entering at the router? Perhaps it has a view of the city and is picking up all kinds of 2.4GHz junk.

Thought #5. Maybe I shouldn't be my usual obnoxious self and pretent that not disclosing the maker and models isn't a capital crime. I'm suppose to burn my time answering when he doesn't even bother supplying enough information to supply a proper answer. I should unload my frustrations, but my body mechanic says to avoid stress. Ok, I think I'll be nice this time.

So much for my thoughts. On to the quiz portion of the posting:

What hardware are you using?
Do you have a view of the city where you could pickup inteference? See list of possible sources at: |
formatting link
different channels. 1, 6, or 11 in the US or 1, 7, or 14 in UK. Try moving the wireless router.
What speed broadband service do you have? Have you tried connecting directly to the router? Measure the directly connected speed with one of the online speed tests. If you post result, please use bits/sec, not Bytes/sec.
What are you getting for connection speeds? Typical signal strengths? Typical S/N ratios? These will come from the various wireless clients.
Run the following test from one of your wireless computers. Start -> Run -> cmd ping -t IP_Addres_of_your_router You should get something like this:

C:\\>ping -t 192.168.1.50 Pinging 192.168.1.50 with 32 bytes of data: Reply from 192.168.1.50: bytes=32 time=4ms TTL=127 Reply from 192.168.1.50: bytes=32 time=3ms TTL=127 Reply from 192.168.1.50: bytes=32 time=3ms TTL=127 Reply from 192.168.1.50: bytes=32 time=3ms TTL=127

Hit C to stop. This is normal.

However, if you get something like this:

C:\\>ping -t 192.168.1.51 Pinging 192.168.1.50 with 32 bytes of data: Reply from 192.168.1.51 bytes=32 time=288ms TTL=127 Request timed out. Reply from 192.168.1.51 bytes=32 time=4ms TTL=127 Reply from 192.168.1.51 bytes=32 time=3ms TTL=127 Reply from 192.168.1.51 bytes=32 time=13ms TTL=127 Reply from 192.168.1.51 bytes=32 time=23ms TTL=127

Note that the times were varying and increasing well above the "normal" 3 to 4 msec. In one case, the delay was sufficient that the reply was never received. The long delays are cause by retransmissions, usually inspired by interference or a poor signal. Even if you are in the same room with the router, you might see such excess delays as the interference does not magically disappear when you are close.