Crowded Network

[I_Terrabull]

I live next to a university. They recently put in a wireless a network for one of the buildings nearest by house. It looks like they flooded every available channel. According to inSSIDER they've got more than 30 APs within range.

Is there anything I can do? I've got a 300/20, but with all the channel interference, I'm lucky to get 25 Mbps. Before they turned on their network, I was getting mid 60s Mbps with my Asus rt66u

 

[fistv]

Aluminum siding Otherwise I might consider going to the IT dept and lodging a complaint of hogging the airwaves. If you have the problem so do your neighbors, go talk to them and do a community complaint.
I live in the boonies and can just barely see my three neighbors networks, I had my wireless open for 4 or so years then I started noticing 10+ iphones and devices connected , walk by's and students waiting for the school bus I guess, locked it down after that.
Good luck.

 

[azazel1024]

Aluminum siding, or 5GHz. You could of course try talking to the university. Even if you can't get them to leave a channel open, you might just be able to convince their IT staff to turn the broadcast power down slightly.

You could also get smaller antennas for your router so that the received signal strength drops a bit. Some 2dBi might actually help in this case. It looks like most of the APs are ranging from medium/low to very low signal strength. This might also be one of those circumstances where if you don't have open firmware, loading something like Merlin or DD-WRT on the router and then cranking up the broadcast power along with somewhat smaller antennas might actually help out.

That or faraday cage/aluminum siding/utilize 5GHz.

 

[CaptainSTX]

With all the competing channels on both 2.4 Ghz & 5 Ghz you will need a strong signal on both bands in all areas of your home. This means multiple APs.

Living in an apartment with more that 30 SSIDs nearby I need to use three dual band routers/APs for good signals, but I still use Ethernet or MOCA connections for all devices that have RJ-45 connections if I want maximum speed.

 

[sfx2000]

There's not much one can do here, as the spectrum is unlicensed, and everybody has access and can build out what they feel they need.

A nicely worded letter to the network team might help, as Aruba does have some smarts behind their wireless controller SW.

good luck!

 

[stevech]

With all the competing channels on both 2.4 Ghz & 5 Ghz you will need a strong signal on both bands in all areas of your home. This means multiple APs.

Living in an apartment with more that 30 SSIDs nearby I need to use three dual band routers/APs for good signals, but I still use Ethernet or MOCA connections for all devices that have RJ-45 connections if I want maximum speed.

Don't forget: It's not the number of SSIDs you detect, it's if one is occasionally very busy with streaming more than Netflix, and is within 3 channels of yours (2.4GHz band).

Most SSIDs uses are light - such as web browsing, email, etc.

If you live in/near a university/college with dorms, you might see atypical loads.

 

[azazel1024]

Very true. However, the more networks there are in range, the greater the chance that one or more will have some kind of meaningful traffic on it at any given time.

That and the more SSIDs, the more beacons you'll have, which does impact WLAN performance to some degree.

 

[stevech]

Very true. However, the more networks there are in range, the greater the chance that one or more will have some kind of meaningful traffic on it at any given time.

That and the more SSIDs, the more beacons you'll have, which does impact WLAN performance to some degree.

True

I live in a dense urban area of townhomes, 3 to a building, buildings about 30 ft. apart. Total of 118. Lots of SSIDs here. But in 15 years, here, I've had no WiFi interference/competition. However, I use MoCA for the heavy lifting to the room where I can't run cat5 and there's some Netflix type streaming, though Netflix is rate-adaptive on the fly, I don't see much more than 2-3 Mbps with it. Streaming from my NAS is no more demanding either.