Jumping to conclusions
You would think I would have learned by now.
But apparently I haven’t. Well, I nearly haven’t.
My little problem started a couple of days ago. I download a few files every morning. I have a little script which I wrote that does it all for me – I just type in a command on the laptop and off it goes connecting hither and thither and grabbing all the files I want. Now in the bad old days it used to take a couple of minutes to do it’s little jobby, but then I upgraded to fibre and the job is finis in around fifteen seconds.
A couple of days ago it stared taking its time again and would sit there for about a minute and a half before announcing its completion with a little fanfare. I wasn’t impressed. I did a speed test on my Interweb connection. It was fucking crawling along at little better than the setup I endured for the last few years.
I pondered this point. If I was still getting an improvement on my old speeds, even if only marginally, then I should be happy? But then the little devil on my shoulder pointed out I was paying for this fibre [albeit slightly less] and was therefore entitled to a bit of service.
This morning, my connection was slugging along again, which somewhat hardened my resolve, so I armed myself with a large mug of tea, a freshly stoked pipe, a few valium and a plate of sandwiches in preparation for what would undoubtedly be a lengthy and frustrating phonecall.
Just before I dialled the dreaded number I thought I would try one more thing. I knew it would be futile but there was no harm in checking, mainly so I could tell the idiot in the call centre that I had indeed tried that. I connected my laptop directly to the modem using cable rather than wireless.
Fuck me!
The needle hit the stop during the test.
Boy but I was relieved I hadn’t dialled that number!
So I spent the last couple of hours tweaking things and generally fucking around with settings, and suddenly my speed on the wifi is back up to reasonably normal. I’m not quite sure what I did, but I know I disabled a couple of things and enabled a couple more [just to keep the balance right – I’m very PC with modems and routers]. I have no idea why it suddenly decided to go rogue the other day, as I hadn’t been anywhere near it.
The moral of this little tale is very simple.
Never jump to conclusions.
How did I not remember that little rule?
Glad you got things back up to speed although I’d still be a bit vexed as to why my WiFi speed suddenly dropped to ‘All ahead dead slow’ all by it’s lonesome.
I have the same problem more or less but at least I know why my WiFi suddenly dropped to nearly nothing and unfortunately there’s no fix for it. My WiFi router spits out a wireless signal at 2.4 Ghz with an 11 channel spread and due to an unfortunate incident with an overgrown punk (goaded on by our neighbor), Herself and I had to resort to putting security cameras, 7 of them, all wireless also at 2.4 Ghz with a 4 channel spread each. The cable modem/wireless router is upstairs, laptops are downstairs so our wireless signal went from fine and dandy before the cameras went up to crawling or not there at all afterwards. A common occurrence it seems when it comes to wireless security cameras.
The fix of course is to not only upgrade the wireless router to 2.4 GHz to a 2.4 Ghz/5.0 Ghz model but to buy all new laptops with 5.0Ghz capability which is not going to happen anytime soon. And we can’t get rid of the troublesome individual either–I’m too old to go to prison.
My router has dual channel but my laptops don’t so it is sort of redundant [unless I upgrade some time in the future].
Most routers have an “auto select” channel, but would it not be possible to explicitly set the channel to avoid the cameras? I use a little scanner on my phone [WiFi Analyzer] to monitor which channels the neighbours might be using and to avoid them.
I think I found what changed – I think I may have enabled locking of devices [so no device can join even if they have the password] but why that should slow things down to that extent, I don’t know. I have actually managed to speed things up even further by disabling DHCP on one of my two networks. It’s only needed for Herself’s radio as everything else is fixed. It just means her radio won’t work at the back of the house!
I took my router off automatic channel switching and tested it (using one of the laptops) using channels 1, 6, and 11 (recommended channels for folks in my predicament). Channel 11 predictably was the best all around. Since the cameras are restricted to 4 channels and I’m assuming channels 1 through 4 here, then the channel with the least or no overlap would be 11.
You mention “Automatic Channel Selection” in the comments above. In my experience, that means it chooses a “default” channel like 6.
I am certainly a believe in a wired connection whenever practicable, or a very big antenna!
Me too. I have the router located near my desktop with a direct cable connection, although to be fair, the laptop (wireless) runs just about as fast, depending on how far away from the router it is. I know absolutely nothing about channels and how many Ghz my router delivers. That’s all esoterica to me.
My router is about six feet away and easy enough to connect by wire. However people would keep tripping over it and my laptop or the router would inevitably end up in pieces on the floor.
Interestingly, the little yoke at the bottom of my screen says that the signal is 100%, but then as soon as I connect it drops to around 80%.
Maybe some day I’ll try out one of those connection-through-the-mains thingies. In the meantime, it’s working so I am going to leave well enough alone!
I think that lowered percentage once connected has something to do with signal to noise ratio on the selected channel but that’s about as far as my experience takes me.
Simular issue with my super hub, sometimes I got it fixed with settings where possible I put in wires, looking on line I saw lots of people in the same situation. The answer was to see the hub to modem mode and buy a dedicated router. Speed great now all over the house, much better range too, some of these all in ones appear not to have the processing power to modem abs route. From atleast a weekly restart and lots of fiddles. I last reset the router in early November when I changed the adapter.
My philosophy is to use the wireless as little as possible so everything that is fixed in position has a wired connection. The only three things that are wireless are my laptop, Herself’s laptop and Herself’s radio [which will only pick up wireless – no socket to hard wire].
I might mess around with a router or two [I seem to have accumulated quite a few from somewhere…], but in the meantime I’ll stick with what I have. If I disconnect Herself’s radio, she goes ballistic!