Devices dropping out of WiFi

[ToughButterCup]

We have two PCs, two phones and a couple of laptops.

 

The PCs manage to keep their connection with our WiFi. But both our phones and a Chromebook lose their WiFi connections.

Trying to re-establish the connection, the connection dialogue box asks for the (long-saved) password. We enter it and the dialogue box immediately rejects it.

 

Not much hair left at the moment. Ideas?

 

[dpmiller]

fixed IPs or auto?

[ToughButterCup]

Auto

 

Both our PCs are fine, its just the 2 Android's and a chromebook

[Construction Channel]

Have you updated anything recently? 

 

Have you added anything new? 

 

Have you tried turning everything off and on again? ( sorry I had to )

[ToughButterCup]

The only recent updates have been  the (massive) Windows update. All on, all off, many times, all hardware inspected for continuity and eejit errors.  

 

What's most curious is that the Chromebook and the phones simply spit the password out of their prams. And I'm writing this post from Debbie's office in Lancaster University on the Chromebook  - the very same one that spits out the password for our WiFi at home.

WiFi works perfectly on our phones at Lancaster University as well. 

 

Cant take a joke? Shouldn'a installed WiFi at home should I?

[SteamyTea]

I was connected to a mates wifi yesterday and the day before and I was getting disconnected a lot. I put that down to their wifi.

Windows was reporting no wifi, but was still connected.  We were experiencing many very short (less than a second) power cuts the day before.  So may hve been something to do with that.

All seems fine now.

The two android devices I have (phone and Fire) seem to work just dandy.

[ToughButterCup]

And now that I have returned home, the sodding Chromebook and my phone connects just fine.

 

Time for a new router?

[SteamyTea]

It may be a problem with the phone line.

The reason I ditched my land line was because it was a dreadful connection.  Dropped out dozens of times a day.

 

[Construction Channel]

10 minutes ago, recoveringacademic said:

now that I have returned home, the sodding Chromebook and my phone connects just fine.

 

They probably just needed a holiday. Problem solved  happy days 

[PeterW]

When did you last turn the router off..??

 

and what are the IP lease times set to ..?? I always set really long lease times and have no real issues tbh. 

 

Fixed IPs can resolve some of this if you’ve got a single router and you assign the numbers at the top of the ranges. Also worth changing your channel to a lesser used one if you can change them. 

[mike2016]

Don't know your adjacency to neighbours but: If you're using the older 2.4GHz channels they often conflicts with neighbours and a lot of channel hopping ensues causing dropouts. Get a 2.4 & 5GHz wireless N router and connect all capable devices to that to solve the issue, configure it so they only connect at the higher frequency. At the very least it will give your 2.4GHz a boost around the house for legacy devices. I got an Asus RT-N66U a few years ago for this purpose. 

 

Oh and for fun if you have an android phone get "wifi analyzer" from the play store and you can see who's signal is thrashing yours and if all the 2.4GHz channels are full - it shows relative strengths of each including 5GHz if your phone support it. 

Edited December 8, 2017 by mike2016
android app fun

[Jeremy Harris]

3 minutes ago, mike2016 said:

Don't know your adjacency to neighbours but: If you're using the older 2.4GHz channels they often conflicts with neighbours and a lot of channel hopping ensues causing dropouts. Get a 2.4 & 5GHz wireless N router and connect all capable devices to that to solve the issue, configure it so they only connect at the higher frequency. At the very least it will give your 2.4GHz a boost around the house for legacy devices. I got an Asus RT-N66U a few years ago for this purpose. 

 

 

We had this problem.  I took a look at the 2.4 GHz spectrum locally and it was silly, choc-a-block with literally hundreds of signals.  The biggest single problem seemed to be mobile wifi.  Our old house was next to a road, that was pretty busy morning and evening.  As so many new cars have wifi, there were literally dozens of signals popping up and disappearing all the time.

 

The fix was to switch to a dual band router, so that those devices that could use the 5 GHz band could. 

 

The problem seems to be that there are so many devices trying to use the same bandwidth in the licence exempt 2.4 GHz band now that it is getting very congested pretty much everywhere.

[ToughButterCup]

Right folks, thanks.

 

Recommendations for dual band router?

[mike2016]

That's funny, I never thought of drive by wifi bombing...?! Maybe someone should offer a faraday cage option for self builders?! Or "please turn off your in car wifi before entering this village" signs?! 

 

Recommendations: Anything with lots of aerials! Asus is a good brand, see what's affordable, I'm not  big fan of linksys/cheaper models. Netgear are usually ok, there's lot of choice. See what comes up in the sales? 

Edited December 8, 2017 by mike2016

[Pete]

Thanks Ian, my wifi playing up now. Must be a local (ish) thing!

[MikeSharp01]

1 hour ago, JSHarris said:

I took a look at the 2.4 GHz spectrum

With your handy spectrum analyser one supposes. I have an old HP unit, weighs about 50Kg but it only goes up to 2GHz perhaps I could transvert it

Edited December 8, 2017 by MikeSharp01

[Jeremy Harris]

11 minutes ago, MikeSharp01 said:

With your handy spectrum analyser one supposes. I have an old HP unit, weighs about 50Kg but it only goes up to 2GHz perhaps I could transvert it

 

Yes, it's an ancient HP 6569A that still works a treat.  I acquired it, along with an even more ancient HP 180A scope, with a load of plug-ins, from a lab closure.

 

Years ago I remember looking at some 15 GHz to 16 GHZ stuff in the lab on a 2 GHz HP spectrum analyser, using the mega expensive HP add-on transverter.  Seemed to work OK, and they may well still be around.

[MikeSharp01]

13 minutes ago, JSHarris said:

Yes, it's an ancient HP 6569A that still works a treat.

what did you have on the front end to pull in the signals?

[Guest Alphonsox]

2 hours ago, recoveringacademic said:

Right folks, thanks.

 

Recommendations for dual band router?

 

I got my hands on a BT SmartHub (aka home hub 6) a few months ago - I've been very impressed with the WiFi performance, I can now get a decent signal in all parts of the house and most of the way down the garden. This has let me ditch two "range extenders" that I'd previously needed. They are usually free with BT broadband or £20-£30 on ebay.

[Jeremy Harris]

38 minutes ago, MikeSharp01 said:

what did you have on the front end to pull in the signals?

 

 

Its noise floor is around -110 dBm at 2.4 GHz, so it's fine just plugged into a high gain antenna with a short length of LMR240 cable.  I made up a patch lead from this with an N type on one end and an RP SMA on the other end for the antenna, which seems to work OK.

[ToughButterCup]

2 hours ago, Pete said:

Thanks Ian, my wifi playing up now. Must be a local (ish) thing!

 

All part of the service mate.....

[Temp]

There have been numerous versions of wifi over the years (eg 802.11b, 802.11g, 802.11n, 802.11a, or 802.11ac etc) some manufacturers rushed out their routers before the standard was finalised. Might be worth trying a router update but obviously a new one would achieve same thing.

 

We switched to a Billion router about two years ago when fibre became available. I didn't intend to use the wifi capability as we already had wifi access points set up but I've been impressed with the signal strength especially as it doesn't have an external antenna. I can't be sure it's not a one off but very happy with it.

[Jeremy Harris]

One other thing to look at is whether the wifi is smart enough to choose the least congested channel.  I have an old D-Link router still running at the old house, and it is exceptionally bad at choosing the best channel within the 2.4 GHz band.  A quick look at what channels any reasonably strong signals from other nearby users are on, then going into the router and manually selecting a different channel, can help.  There are some reasonably easy to use bits of free software that will use the device's wifi receiver to give an indication of the amplitude of all the signals it can identify, like https://www.acrylicwifi.com/en/wlan-software/wlan-scanner-acrylic-wifi-free/ but you need to take their signal strength readings with a bit of a pinch of salt, as the RSSI output from many wifi devices isn't well calibrated, it's really just useful for making relative comparisons between signals.

[SteamyTea]

I just noticed that my 'quiet hours' was on.  This is after the last Windows 10 update (the fairly big one).  That may have accounted for the drop out on my mates  wireless.

Turned it off now and all seems fine.

I did, when I was with TalkTalk, set up an RPi that pinged google every 5 seconds, was just to prove to myself that my connection was really causing problems.

[SteamyTea]

@JSHarris

Your link is faulty

 

This works

https://www.acrylicwifi.com/en/wlan-software/wlan-scanner-acrylic-wifi-free