The building I work in is an emergency operations center and is heavily constructed, thus making our wireless range very limited. In order to get wireless reception in some other rooms we added a WAP to our existing wireless router. The problem is that when connecting to the WAP network we are often unable to connect to the internet even though the computer says we are connected to the network with a maximum strength signal. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. Also, and I don’t know if its related, streaming video through the WAP seems to be a problem. It buffers forever sometimes and sometimes its fine. There doesn’t seem to be a buffering issue when within range of the wireless modem and using that network. The same one year old laptop is being used in all cases. Other laptops have been tried and have the same problem. Any ideas?
As an aside, the county owns and operates the building but won’t help us out with technical support even though we are county employees. They don’t pay for our internet service nor did they pay for any of the wireless equipment. My work group is not very computer literate so KIS because we are S.
I am assuming you are using the older 802.11/b or g equipment. the N standard is supposed to be superior, but not all laptops, etc have n wireless cards.
b & g use the same frequencies. There are 11 US authorized channels. The thing is the channels are fairly wide and overlap. In order not to overlap you need 5 channels of spacing. So channels 1,6, and 11 can operate without overlapping. For this reason most WAPs and WAP/modems default to one of these, usually channel 6.
So channel 6 is usually fairly crowded and noisy because it seems like 90% or more of the WAPs never get changed from default settings. If both your units are still on 6, then that is the problem right there…suprise is that it works at all, but it can if you are far enough from one that the other dominates
Try setting your equipment to either channels 3 and 8 or 4 and 9. This will give you the 5 channels of spacing between them so they don’t overlap, and also give you 2 or 3 channels of spacing from the default channels your neighbors are most likely using.
If you want to be more systematic than just “try it and see if it works” there is freeware called network stumbler that will allow you to see what channels your neighbors are using, and how strong the signals are, so you can put your equipment where it is likely to have the least interference. Stumbler does not work with all wireless cards, though I have had pretty good luck slapping it on a random laptop and getting useful data.
ETA Is there a microwave oven in the breakroom? I have had issues with these blowing out certain wireless channels.
Let me say up front that I’m pretty much a computer moron. How do you change channels on the equipment? Its not like there are any buttons to do it. IT did not set this up. I don’t know who did. I think we just plugged everything in, followed whatever directions came with the WAP and it worked (usually). It shows up on the “Available Networks” as “ciscob” along with the original wireless router network and a few other networks in the building. I assume that means it has created its own network? How do you go about configuring the WAP?
Take it off, before it truly screws things up.
Seriously.
Once it hands out addresses that the router doesn’t know about, things will screw up quickly.
Can you get your IT guy to configure it for you?
That involves communicating with the router using it’s IP address and a browser, telling it not to hand out addresses and stuff.