Santa brought me interference for Christmas

[jcn]

The number of APs around me here in my congested NYC home went from 12 to about 37 overnight (damn you Claus!!! ), and only God knows how many more baby monitors, cell phones, microwaves and all other sorts of 2.4GHz crud hit the airwaves over that time. As a result, my 2 story home that used to be very well covered by a single Asus RT-N16 running Tomato is now overmatched the point where I can't move more than 15 feet away from it without losing signal (and I won't depress you with talk of throughput, it's pathetic).

I've been toying with a number of different N routers to see if I could get my RSSI to improve watching inSSIDer, but it looks like the best I can do even sitting 5 feet from the router is about -25dbm.

I'm wondering what my options are here. I do have an army of Tomato-capable routers (an Asus RT-N16, an Asus RT-N12, and a TP-Link TL-WR841ND), and I've got wired ethernet in different spots in the house to accommodate them.

I've been contemplating a few possibilities:
- Set up the routers in a WDS configuration - I think that would improve coverage, but from what I understand, each hop down the line the throughput would be halved, and it seems to be wasteful since I'm wired in other locations.
- Set up the routers for meshed bridging with each AP connected via ethernet
- Pick up a dual-band router that supports 5GHz.

I've already done the obvious - varying channels (to no avail, if you see the graph it's like radiation central in here), moving around antenna orientation, moving the AP. The one other thing I think would obviously help would be dual band, but I'm guessing signal attenuation from 5GHz combined with my old NYC home isn't going to be very impressive, not to mention I have no dual band equipment at the present (and that's 3 USB adapters I'd have to buy for the laptops, put aside the new router I'd need).

Would bridging the wireless network through an ethernet backend help at all?

Open to other ideas, if you've got one, please let me know!

Thanks,
-John

 

[stevech]

The NUMBER of SSIDs is not important.
The WiFi channel utilization (up to 100%) by these SSIDs is IMPORTANT.

Common consumer gear tells you the number of and signal strength of nearby
WiFi routers' beacon signals. You aren't told how much airtime each is using (channel utilization).

You want to avoid a channel (in 2.4GHz, the channels to use are 1, 6 and 11) where a neighbor does a lot of video streaming or heavy file transfers (kids doing music or video file swapping).

I can't suggest a cheap way of measuring how busy a channel is. All I can say is use speedtest.net and take a broad average over hours/days and change channels if the speed seems impaired on a given channel.

As 2.4GHz gets more bloated up with streaming media, the 5.8GHz band will grow in use.

It's not all that bad though: streaming video from the Internet is relatively low loading - like 1 to 4 Mbps. The killer is streaming on the LAN, from a server or some such were the WiFi load is 20+ Mbps HD.

I moved my streaming video from WiFi to MoCA. Much better.

 

[Terry Kennedy]

Open to other ideas, if you've got one, please let me know!

I'd suggest going to 5GHz, either with a simultaneous dual-band unit or by adding a separate 5GHz access point. Be careful when looking at dual-band units - many are dual-band, but not at the same time - you have to configure for one or the other.

I've been "that annoying guy" in my neighborhood for many years (I have AP's on 1, 6, and 11) but there are now something like 50 routers/access points within range and my usable coverage has been shrinking, so I looked at 5GHz and there are NO units broadcasting. As I need to support legacy clients that only operate at 2.4GHz, I am installing simultaneous dual-band access points (Cisco Aironet 1252's - way overkill for the average home user).

I expect it will be quite some time before 5GHz gets as congested as the 2.4GHz band, particularly with the number of devices that default to auto channel selection.

 

[stevech]

The OP says there are lots of SSIDs detected. But I didn't see where he says his WiFi encounters actual excessive interference on all three channels in 2.4GHz.
The 15 ft. range issue is another problem.