Comment by eqvinox 2 days ago
> Set transmit power to High
Do NOT do this if you live in a densely populated area (e.g. apartment complex). You'll create noise for yourself and everybody else. Classic prisoner's dilemma - a few people could be assholes and profit from it, but if everyone's an asshole everybody suffers.
General rule on TX power: start on low and increase only if you know (or can confirm) it helps. Go back down if it doesn't.
Also, the higher frequencies are much more affected by absorption from little things like "walls" and "trees" which are occasionally part of the RF environment, so you're far less likely to interfere with your neighbors doing this, than you were with 2.4GHz.
Also the reason it makes such an enormous difference to put your AP in the same room, if at all possible. Sneak a cable somewhere, park the AP in the far corner of the room, sure. But with zero walls in between, it's huge.
In my experience concrete walls and ceilings in apartment complexes completely block 5 GHz signals. Even through modern triple glass windows most of signal is lost. I can't receive any other 5 GHz networks inside my apartment, but around 50 on 2.4 GHz, which makes 2.4 nearly unusable anyway.
In the US, I would venture at least half, if not more, apartment complexes have wood and drywall walls and ceilings. No concrete is used above the first floor.
> General rule on TX power: start on low and increase only if you know (or can confirm) it helps. Go back down if it doesn't.
The people reading this are techies. Nobody else will do this. Either it should be built into the protocol, or the advice should be abandoned.
This may not help if you can’t control your environment. You will often benefit from nearby routers hearing you and each other if you are forced to share a channel with them, as that is what enables the carrier sensing to work correctly. Otherwise neighbouring APs that can’t hear your quieter use of the channel may shout over your devices rather than backing off, creating collisions and resulting in retransmits.
You can get this kind of interfere even if the signal from the router to your device is sitting just above the noise floor and the property next to you is doing the same thing. Both signals are so weak they get drowned out by an even weaker signal. The router on the other hand can’t tell the message is corrupted until your device responds.
You control your environment by not adding yourself to the dicks creating the bad environment. Everything else is just rationalizing for your own maximum convenience.
There is no such problem as "you have to shout enough so the others hear that you're there". There's no such thing, by at least 2 different vectors. 1, They hear everyone just fine, weak and strong, all at the same time. 2, It doesn't matter even if they didn't, because you obviously hear them if you're getting clobbered by them, and so your router can channel hop around them even if they don't channel hop around you.
While indeed you shouldn't fix noise by shouting louder, your justification isn't quite right.
1. It's the AP that has to decide to change channel, and if you live somewhere with channel contention, from its perspective all channels will be busy. At that point, if your channel appears the quietest (either by being the least noisy or by your clients not being active), then the AP will decide to clobber your channel. Their WiFi devices may also not hear you and won't back off to give your airtime, even though you hear theirs and give them airtime.
2. Having your AP change channel (note: channel hopping is something else entirely, which isn't used for WiFi) wouldn't help when all channels are busy. As long as your usage appears quiet, other APs will keep moving on top of you during their channel optimization.
For residential, the only solution is to use technology that cannot propagate to neighbors. 5/6GHz and many APs, and good thick walls (mmm, reinforced concrete). WiFi channels is a solution to make a few bits of equipment coexist in the same space, but is of limited use when it comes to segregating your space from that of your neighbors. Especially if you want good performance, as there's very few wide channels available.
If you’re using the same channel as a neighbouring router that’s close enough to overpower yours then you’ve already lost, pick a different channel. If you stick to 20 mhz there are plenty options, even more if you are able to use DFS channels.
Yes, exactly, this means you shouldn’t use 320Mhz.
Find quietest 20mhz available on 5 or 6 GHz. It’ll be far more reliable than trying to battle someone over the 320.
Quite right. However, if your wifi bridge has an option for auto tuning the power then that might be a future proofing option, assuming that everyone uses it, which they probably won't sigh
If wifi becomes a pain within a shared building then seriously consider ethernet. Slimline stick on trunking will hide the wires at about £1-2/m. A box of CAT6, solid core is less than £1/m. You will also need some back boxes, modules and face plates (~£2.50 each) and a POST tool (fiver?) Or you can try and bodge RJ45 plugs onto the solid core CAT6 - please don't unless you really know what you are doing: it looks messy and is seriously prone to weird failures.
For the 6GHz frequencies used, this isn’t really as big of a deal as everyone has made it out to be. The advice was shared in the early days of 2.4GHz WiFi with into 3 non-overlapping channels, higher penetration of 2.4GHz signals, and competition with all of the other cheap devices in the 2.4GHz space.
The 6GHz space isn’t even competing with classic WiFi. It’s really fine. There’s no prisoner’s dilemma or some moral high ground from setting it to low. It will make virtually no difference for your neighbors.
The real world difference is actually pretty minimal between power settings.
The actual risk with modern hardware is that the high power setting starts running the power amplifier in a higher distortion area of the curve which degrades signal quality in exchange for incrementally longer range.