The Black Art of WiFi

The Black Art of WiFi

I wonder how many of us (especially the technically minded) have heard our friends lament their Netflix streaming difficulties, or that they can’t connect to their WiFi printer, or that their WiFi router seems to disconnect regularly.

In the mid-2000’s I probably learned more than a sensible person should regarding wireless. I was living in Italy, and part of a team which installed “Broadband over WiFi” for two small French villages where France Telecom announced they would never provide broadband service, as not enough people lived there to make it worthwhile.

Our plan was to share a satellite internet connection at roof top level and enable customers’ computers to connect. This usually worked, as long as the antennas could see each other. Once seeing what we were doing could make money, France Telecom announced that the two towns we were working in would become their pilot project for Village DSL.They came in with a price which we couldn’t match, and we closed down. I like to think that we were instrumental in bringing Broadband to these villages, just not the way we expected.

In 2004, I worked with another group near Bassano Del Grappa, in Northeast Italy, essentially doing the same thing. This time we had a broadband uplink arrive by Ethernet cable at the top of a mountain on the other side of the city. We broadcast the signal down, over the top of the city, to commuter towns on the other side. All told, that signal traveled 22km and arrived at full bandwidth!

francesco

(My colleague, Francesco, installing the antenna at the mountain).

We often changed equipment to boost speed because our clients were spending the entire bandwidth downloading illegal material on bit-torrent. This design phase brought me to terms with how radio signals travel, how much of a signal is lost over distance, how signals bounce off objects and cause data loss, and how the worst thing for a connection actually tends to be too much signal.

In the middle of the US, most places now have high-speed broadband about 50 times faster than ten years ago (at least Cable is). The killer application (residentially) is now video streaming. If the device is not correctly connecting  to your WiFi router, the stream will be un-watchable. Probably the best piece of advice I give is if you can connect your device by Ethernet cable, do it. It will work so much better. However, many devices, like Roku and Chromecast, don’t have that ability and are WiFi only. What suggestions do I give then?

  • Put your router in a central location – away from “reflections”. Run more Ethernet cable to gain a better, more central, position. Try to aim for line of sight to where your streaming device is from your router antenna.
  • Don’t use a cheap “big-box-store” router. These are underpowered, embedded routers, which are never updated. They can’t normally handle the number of simultaneous connections that we are throwing at them. Quite often, their power supplies are cheap, and any fluctuation in voltage has a habit of crashing them. Some of them, especially those which give access to a USB drive over the network, are huge security risks!
  • Get a WiFi audit of your house or business to work out what channels are being used in your neighborhood and switch to the lesser used ones. Or whether you have areas with black holes where the signal doesn’t reach or is blocked. For instance, we ran a WiFi audit on the area where Rockford’s City Market takes place to discover the extent of our public WiFi coverage.

citymarket3 (1)

  • Understand there are only 3 of 11 (or 13 in Europe) usable channels in 2.4ghz WiFi. These overlap each other. So, channels 1, 6, and 11 are the only ones which will not overlap with each other. But channel 3 will overlap with 1 and 6).
  • Switch to 5ghz if you can! 2.4ghz is unregulated, shared between Bluetooth and cordless telephones, and is susceptible to interference from microwave ovens. 5ghz is also unregulated, but not used widely yet. Higher frequencies, like 5ghz, won’t travel as well through walls.
  • Remember newer technology may not work as you expect. 802.11n has the ability to combine frequencies together for faster speed, but then you will have more collisions with your neighbors, or your laptop (or one of your other devices) just won’t connect with it. Your goal is to make your streaming site work well, not necessarily as fast as it possibly can.
  • When problems arise, test your connection speed via a cable to identify if the problem is WiFi related or provider related. For instance, if your connection breaks every time it rains, it probably isn’t WiFi related.

Getting WiFi optimized is still a black art. Having the correct tools saves much trial and error. A WiFi heat map of your area really helps, as does seeing the signal strength for every device connected to your router. As you’d probably expect, we have a favorite router, and it’s the same make as I used doing our community broadband. Please call us if you would like help with these, in the meanwhile, see if the above 7 points speed things up.