Until about a year ago, I've been happily chugging along with a Zyxel X550 wireless router. Fast speeds, never crashed. Loved it.
My place isn't that big -- it's a house with 2 floors, and the router is on the bottom floor towards the back. I have devices on the upper floor (Tivo, iPad, and a laptop) that I use and they're towards the front of the house. Like I said, it's not a big place -- probably 75ft ft from the front to the back of the house, if even that.
About a year ago, I started being unable to reliably connect to the laptop on the top floor. Signal strength fell from 4-5 bars to 2 bars and I basically stutter my way through web browsing.
Long story short, I thought it was my router, so I started upgrading -- tried a Zyxel X550n (didn't get any better of a connection), a Netgear 3700 (much worse than any other router I tried in terms of speed and interface), a Buffalo "Hi Power" N router, an Asus N16 (both stock and Tomato firmware), an Apple Airport Extreme WITH an express for bridging, and finally, a Linksys e3000 (which is what I still have...)
The e3000 seemed to work brilliantly for a while...fast speeds, good connection. Then one night, it dropped to two bars again. I installed iStumbler on the laptop and it shows horrendous Signal to noise ratios whenever I have these weird signal degradation issues.
What is causing this interference?? Is there any way to combat it? I basically have no clue how to "fix" this...
My place isn't that big -- it's a house with 2 floors, and the router is on the bottom floor towards the back. I have devices on the upper floor (Tivo, iPad, and a laptop) that I use and they're towards the front of the house. Like I said, it's not a big place -- probably 75ft ft from the front to the back of the house, if even that.
About a year ago, I started being unable to reliably connect to the laptop on the top floor. Signal strength fell from 4-5 bars to 2 bars and I basically stutter my way through web browsing.
Long story short, I thought it was my router, so I started upgrading -- tried a Zyxel X550n (didn't get any better of a connection), a Netgear 3700 (much worse than any other router I tried in terms of speed and interface), a Buffalo "Hi Power" N router, an Asus N16 (both stock and Tomato firmware), an Apple Airport Extreme WITH an express for bridging, and finally, a Linksys e3000 (which is what I still have...)
The e3000 seemed to work brilliantly for a while...fast speeds, good connection. Then one night, it dropped to two bars again. I installed iStumbler on the laptop and it shows horrendous Signal to noise ratios whenever I have these weird signal degradation issues.
What is causing this interference?? Is there any way to combat it? I basically have no clue how to "fix" this...