Will Crappy Channel Assignment Kill Wi-Fi?
I’m not making this up! Everywhere I go, and even at home, I have a problem with Wi-Fi. People are making bad channel assignment choices; everything from choosing the same channel as their neighbor or picking something outside the range of non-overlapping channels (1, 6, and 11 in the USA). The hotel I’m staying at right now is using 8, which (as I understand it) means they are fighting with channels 6 and 11.
Is this why Wi-Fi is slow everywhere I go, or is it something else? At home, I had to put in some short runs of structured cabling because iTunes kept dropping its connection to my AirPort Express.
May 14th, 2007 at 10:01 pm
Yes, I agree. I had trouble with my Kyocera KR1 when traveling, even when I was ~5m from the unit! Finally, I changed the channel assignment to 3, which was fine for EVDO. I found channel 3 to be far away from channel 6 (which is commonly used) yet is far enough from channel 1 (which is used enough to create interference).
Seems like 802.11n is showing up just in time. Can you imagine how standard b/g would continue to degrade over the next several years without a new standard that makes better use of bandwidth?