I’m looking at a campus-wide Wifi network for someone. It’s not huge, something like 25 APs.
They have occasional inexplicable dropouts on their laptops. I’ve tried everything that makes sense and still nothing.
As part of my experimentation I fire up Netstumbler and run some graphs. The strange thing is that I can see a load of APs nearby (of course) and my graph is a fairly reliable graph bouncing around a delta of about 5dBm. Okay, great.
But then I have on a fairly regular (but inconsistent) basis, single pixel-wide drops to -100dBm. Then it picks up back where it was before.
Has anyone seen anything like this? The funny thing, is that when I miss a ping (every couple hundred pings), that is NOT when I’m getting one of my drops to -100dBm.
Maybe the receiver is getting desensitized by a strong out-of-band signal. Can you borrow a spectrum analyzer from someone?
Be aware that you are operating in an ISM band where you have no protection from interference. Licensed users may be operating in the band at much higher power levels than what is allowed for wi-fi.
Yeah, that’s pretty much what I was thinking. But without an analyzer I’m stuck with saying, “Yeah, well, it’s probably that. But it might not be. But I think it is.”
Not a big fan of “it’s someone else’s fault” answers.