There’s four people who use our gateway. Please read carefully:
Call me roommate A. I use a desktop PC with a wired connection. My phone can use the gateway, but is configured not to. I tried for diagnostic reasons, & network does not show up for my phone, either.
Roommate B uses a laptop and a tablet. They both always connected to our network, no problem. Only now, our network does not show up in his “available network” list.
Roommates C and D probably hook up with laptops, phones, and a playstation. They are having no wireless connection problems.
FIRSE OF ALL, I checked, and our ISP does not limit the # of simultaneous connections.
Most of us are using Windows 7, except the phones of course.
I tried uninstalling & reinstalling wireless card & network card in roommate B’s laptop. No dice. Six million other nearby networks show up, but not ours. Not even the guest account.
We have new neighbors downstairs. One website said that if your neighbors’ signal was stronger than your (Comcast) gateway’s sgnal, it would bump it offline. But then a bunch of people piled on saying that was BS.
Thought I should mention that I tried that too, from inside his laptop’s “networking and sharing center.” The app took its sweet time searching, but ultimately did not find the network even by name.
That’s a great suggestion, though, Whack-a-Mole. Thank you.
Also, gonna mention again that the other two roommates are having no problem connecting wirelessly.
Your Wi-Fi router may have both 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz capability. It’s possible for the 2.4 GHz part to be turned off, defective, or drowned out by other 2.4 GHz devices.
Then, if A’s and B’s tablets and laptops had 2.4 GHz capability only, you’d get the combination you describe. It’s more likely that a cell phone will have both 2.4 and 5 GHz capability, because people change phones every 2 years.
When we got a new microwave oven in a new spot in the kitchen, the Wi-Fi started cutting out intermittently on some devices. It took a while for us to blame the microwave. We reconfigured the router to have different names for the 2.4 and 5 GHz connections, and soon found out which devices could only list the 2.4 GHz name. The laptop (pretty high-end Lenovo, 2014) was one of them; remedied using a 15-dollar Wi-Fi dongle from Amazon.
Thanks, Heracles, that may well be what’s going on. Or something like it.
Apparently the network just came back for him. Mind you, it was gone from tuesday night through today, saturday.
So, ELIF if you don’t mind – I understand that a microwave oven might be part of the IOT. You might want to tell it to start cooking your dinner before you get home, or something. But, while they often occur together, the capacity to receive a signal is not the same thing as sending a signal. Why would your microwave be emitting an ongoing signal that would supercede your router’s signal?
The microwave would only interfere when you were cooking.
As the name implies, microwave ovens generate microwaves - lots of them, in the same band as 2.4GHz WiFi, so they are famous for causing interference. But, only when in use.
Yes. The old (1981) microwave oven was in the corner of the kitchen. When it died a couple of years ago, we bought one that goes above the range, a more central position where it can cause more interference. My hubby likes to use the microwave to heat the water for his morning coffee(s), so it gets used at the same time as the laptop…
