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I don’t particularly like wireless, it’s slow at the best of times (when compared to cabled ethernet) and can occasionally be downright unreliable.  On the other hand, it’s a great money saver especially when living in rented or temporary accomodation and is essential when using a laptop/phone on the couch, outside on the toilet etc.  My biggest problem with it recently though is complete wireless spectrum congestion in my new area (Balham, UK).

We’ve lived in a few built up areas around London already, some far more so than Balham, but i’ve never seen so many AP’s in the one residential area before, my scan’s show between 10 – 50 different networks at various times throughout the day.

A ‘lean’ site survey, it’s usually 3-4x as many

Most of the time, my router appears to work perfectly, then suddenly (as much as a couple of times a day), the network connection stops responding and I need to go and change the channel.  A ping of the router looks like this:

shannon@vostro:~$ ping 192.168.1.1
PING 192.168.1.1 (192.168.1.1) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=945.41 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=2 ttl=64 time=1401.52 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=3 ttl=64 time=2788.41 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=4 ttl=64 time=4342.34 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=5 ttl=64 time=6309.23 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=6 ttl=64 time=10345.58 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=7 ttl=64 time=13424.52 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=8 ttl=64 time=16435.42 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=9 ttl=64 time=17334.73 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=10 ttl=64 time=18223.47 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=11 ttl=64 time=20994.43 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=12 ttl=64 time=22534.4 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=13 ttl=64 time=24998.25 ms

With this many AP’s in the area, short of installing a faraday cage in the external walls of the house, I may be forced to use the 5.8Ghz 802.11a band which doesn’t work with a lot of devices such as my old laptop, phones, printer, etc.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 3rd, 2009 at 10:13 pm and is filed under Development, Online, Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.