Measuring Signal for Rearrangement

[gotcha640]

Hello Forum

I'm trying to help my inlaws get better wifi coverage throughout their house. I've used heat map apps in the past (like this) but that really only shows signal to the router/AP you're connected to, not "outside" bandwidth (or at least, I've only used it that way. Not sure quite what to call it).

So, if I have a main router upstairs on one side of the house, and a repeater bridge downstairs behind a concrete wall, it will look like I have great signal there. They are absolutely not interested in running ethernet, or I would have run APs around already.

Is there a better program for this, or a better way of measuring the (again, not sure what word I'm looking for here) "outside" signal?

 

[RogerSC]

Don't know if you have any Android stuff, but "WiFi Analyzer" on my Android phone is useful for me when I'm looking at signal strength at a given point. Since there's nothing like that on my new iPhone, I'm keeping the older Android phone specifically to run that app *smile*.

 

[stevech]

Hello Forum

I'm trying to help my inlaws get better wifi coverage throughout their house. I've used heat map apps in the past (like this) but that really only shows signal to the router/AP you're connected to, not "outside" bandwidth (or at least, I've only used it that way. Not sure quite what to call it).

So, if I have a main router upstairs on one side of the house, and a repeater bridge downstairs behind a concrete wall, it will look like I have great signal there. They are absolutely not interested in running ethernet, or I would have run APs around already.

Is there a better program for this, or a better way of measuring the (again, not sure what word I'm looking for here) "outside" signal?

Outside meaning neighbors' WiFi?
Not a lot of value in studying neighbors' WiFi because next week/month it will likely be quite different.

Did you consider connecting 1 or 2 APs using MoCA or HomePlug/HPNA instead of the undesirable repeater (WDS)?

 

[gotcha640]

Outside meaning Internet, meaning not just the lan.

I'm off to read about moca. Thanks for the reminder.

 

[azazel1024]

Are your in-laws receiving internet through WISP?

If not, why would you need to measure the "internet signal"? For WISP, it is pretty much up to whatever WISP router you have to tell you what kind of signal it is getting, especially if it is on 900MHz instead of 2.4 or 5GHz. The later you can measure using most wifi analyzer tools, but you aren't likely to be able to measure actually through put that way.

If you have fixed line internet service, then WLAN/local wifi network performance is comparable to internet performance, up to or until the internet connection is maxed out by local performance.

IE if you can get 14Mbps for local network wireless transfers, that is roughly what your internet connection is going to max out at through wireless transfers from the same location.

 

[byonik]

Sounds like what your after is actual real-world throughput to the Internet. I agree that having a strong signal does not necessarily mean you will have good throughput.

I would just use speedtest and run a bunch of tests with a few devices to see where your problem spots are.

If you have a decent signal but not good throughput, use WiFi Analyzer to see if a neighbor's WAP might be causing you issues (assuming you have neighbors). I have found that most folks leave their router's channel set to auto, so if you select channel 1, 6, or 11 instead of auto, you may be able to push the neighboring WAPs to the other two non-overlapping channels, leaving you with your own channel.