So my eternal battle with my shitty internet connection rages on. Last night I took my computer downstairs and plugged it in via LAN to my router. It worked like a charm. However, up in my room I constantly have full bars on my wifi signal, but often have no internet. It’s not the ISP. At this point, it could be my PC’s wifi chip or the router. Now here’s where it gets weird.
My girlfriend’s laptop works fine downstairs near the router. When she’s up in my room, it tends to have internet problems at the same rate as my PC. This is also weird in that sometimes I have a really good, really clear signal, and other times it just blows up completely - if it was a hardware malfunction on the side of the router, you’d think it would constantly be on the fritz, but a lot of the time I have no trouble. What’s more, when I bought a Wifi signal extender and set it up, it completely destroyed the connection.
I honestly don’t know what’s going wrong. It’s not the ISP. It’s not my browser. It wouldn’t appear to be a weak signal (as said, I get full bars and still no/slow connection) It’s gotta be either the router or my wifi chip, and so far I’m getting really mixed signals. How would I check if it’s one or the other? How can I troubleshoot this? Any advice would be welcome.
Have you tried changing channels on the wifi router? Or using only 802.11g or only 802.11n, instead of the default “everything” that most routers ship with?
Buy a little Wifi USB dongle with an antenna that you can adjust.
The wifi signal is concentrated by the antenna in a donut shape zone radiating perpendicular to the antenna. So if it is straight up the signal is going through the walls and far less signal will go through the floor. If you are on another floor, turning the antenna horizontal can make a big difference. Do the same with the antenna on the router.
There are plenty of free Wifi diagnostic tools out there depending on your operating system which will give you more clues as to what is going on. Sometimes there is a lot of interference from other wifi signals in the neighbourhood and you can change to a less congested channel.
Seconded. It might not solve the problem but this is the first trouble-shooting step I would take.
The vast majority of users never change their router defaults, so the default channel could be saturated or subject to interference. Try changing it from “default” to channels 1, 6, or 11.
To do that, you need to access your router’s config page with your web browser. You’ll need to know your router’s internal ip address, user name and password. If you haven’t changed your router configuration before, you can probably find the default settings on the manufacturer’s web site.
If you google the name of your router you should find a clue to what address it uses.
Of course once you are on the router admin page you need log in to it with a user name and password. Then find your way to the page that lets you change the channel number.
If you don’t know your user name and password of your routers. Again google your router name, it may be left at its default. user: admin and password: password is pretty common.
If it is left at its default it is prudent to change it to something more secure.
Your Wifi diagnostic software will show you which other Wifi routers are sharing each channel. Look for one that gives you a display of local wifi networks and their channels like on the bottom right of this webpage. Choose a channel that overlaps the least with other neworks.