I live in an apartment with two other people. My router is as central as I can get it and is about 6’ off the floor on a shelf. My roommate’s computer that’s furthest from the router stays offline every day until about 7 pm when he gets home from work. While that computer stays offline my WiFi runs fine. Once he turns on his computer and gets online it slows down quite noticeably. Can a router tell how far away a computer is, and if it can, does it somehow “even out” the signal, so that every device’s connection is degraded? Is there anything I can do to remedy this? Some setting, or something? I’m a little more knowledgeable than the average computer user, but this is out of my wheelhouse. Thanks
What is the speed of the internet connection you are sharing?
The location of the router in relation to the computers is a non-starter. Your roommate is hogging bandwidth. My first guess would be media torrenting, or maybe he streams Netflix, or possibly trying to upload large files on an asymmetrical connection. I lived with a self-styled photographer for a year. Her multi-gigabyte proof uploads would bring my download speed to its knees for the duration.
Anyway, regardless of the cause, it sounds likely that this guy is a bandwidth hog. But if you have admin access to the router, and he doesn’t, you may have some options to fix the problem–including prioritizing your traffic over his, limiting his speed based on his computer’s MAC address, or port blocking. What router do you have (brand and model)? There’s some good general advice here and there, but it may not be easy to follow (or may not even apply) depending on your router’s settings.
I agree with Rachellelogram: WiFi doesn’t care how far away something is as long as it’s within a maximum distance and the signal is sufficiently good.
A bandwidth hog would account for all of your symptoms. It’s the simplest answer which accounts for everything, so it’s probably the correct one.
The way you fix it is to either confront the person or do something with your router so this person’s packets are deprioritized. The first is preferred, as the second might not be reasonably possible with the router you have, and, frankly, if you’re asking questions about this stuff, I’m hesitant to suggest Tomato or DD-WRT, even if I knew your router could support third-party firmware.
What you need is either a Clue-By-Four or a router that implements Quality of Service (QoS) aka bandwidth management.
If his WiFi speed is slower it can slow down the entire network. Slower either due to old age or due to distance. The router sends out some housekeeping network traffic that is sent to all clients simultaneously. It can only do that at the speed of the slowest client, so your fast client is constantly shifting between its fast speed and the slow speed, resulting in an overall slowdown.
It’s a cradlepoint mbr1000 (kind of old, I know, but it’s served its purpose). I’ve looked into Tomato and DD-WRT before but IIRC neither supported the mbr1000. The newest OEM firmware is from 2012, which I have already. Its configuration options are rather extensive. So I should filter his MAC address to limit his percentage of the bandwidth? My connection is 30mbps downstream from the cable company, and I believe my wifi is 72mbps. It’s 802.11n on the 2.4 GHz band. Of course there are probably 15 other networks within range, and I’ve set it to broadcast on the least populated channel (Ch. 11 in my case).
Absolutely. However, I’ve had a quick gander at the manual (pdf) and I’m not sure that you can filter by MAC address. Traffic shaping is on p57 ff and it seems to work on protocols and IP addresses. A way round that might be to add a DHCP reservation (p21) for his computer. A closer inspection of the manual is required.
“Physical Center” of the apartment does not always equal “best location”. Cinderblock walls, metal cabinets, and other barriers can reduce wifi signal strength. (Glass does not, iirc.)
In all honesty, I doubt that the problem is to do with the distance from the router. My computer is the furthest away from the router, showing only a 2 bar signal strength - yet my computer is still able to get a speed of 30Mbps, which is what we are paying for.
Even with two computers running, and at peak time, I can still get 20Mbps+ connection. The problem is probably to do with bandwidth issues.
Several people have jumped to the conclusion that the roommate is a bandwidth hog. IMO that’s premature. Maybe the OP is.
Said another way, if the OP is doing things which take 90% of the downlink speed form the ISP, or 90% of the WiFI link speed, he’ll experience a great experience using the infrastructure by himself.
Until two people each want to do things that naturally require 90% of the available link speed. Now they’re collectively demanding 180% of available. Each participant will therefore see something like a 50% reduction in throughput.
Which is plenty enough to make what had seemed instant change to what seems like a crawl. The perception of speed loss will be much worse than linear.
Whether the OP or the roommate should have the lion’s share, or whether it’s a 50-50% deal depends on the terms of their roommating arrangement. Not something we’re privy to here. Yet.