My closest neighbor's router is always switching to my WiFi channel.

[Buldozerx]

I use WiFi Analyzer to pick a free channel. After picking a channel, my neighbor's router switches its channel to the one I chose. It might take a few days for this to happen. The router is very close to my house, so my channel will suffer congestion as a result.

Any idea why this is happening, and if there is anything I could do to avoid this? There are plenty of free channels.

 

[L&LD]

Ask him to choose a free channel, manually.

 

[Buldozerx]

Ask him to choose a free channel, manually.

Haha, no, I'm not going to bother some old dude and ask him to lend me his computer to fix this.

 

[thiggins]

Haha, no, I'm not going to bother some old dude and ask him to lend me his computer to fix this.

I would not dismiss this suggestion out of hand. There is no technology you can apply on your network to fix this. The solution could be as simple as discussing the problem with your neighbor to see if there is a mutually agreeable solution, like disabling auto-channel selection on his router...assuming it is enabled.

 

[Buldozerx]

I would not dismiss this suggestion out of hand. There is no technology you can apply on your network to fix this. The solution could be as simple as discussing the problem with your neighbor to see if there is a mutually agreeable solution, like disabling auto-channel selection on his router...assuming it is enabled.

But what technology tell his WiFi auto channel to follow mine? It doesn't make sense.

 

[Smokey613]

You might try setting yours to auto and see if that helps your issue. At this point, it couldn’t hurt to try it.

 

[L&LD]

Wi-Fi is a shared medium, and all known protocols try to follow this. Whether a router is in a mesh or AP wireless setup, the best performance of the total (overall) system is when all the AP's are on the same channel. That makes it easiest for the routers to share airtime.

If your neighbor's router is sensing/detecting even worse interference from other channels from his adjacent neighbors, it will always pick yours (rightly or wrongly), because you're so close together.

Sometimes, the worse thing to do (counter-intuitively) is to pick a channel from a just perceptible signal from another router thinking yours will overpower it. What happens there is that the two routers must communicate with each other first, before transmitting what is requested, but because they are at the fringe range, they are taking much more airtime to do so.

Are you using 160Mhz width channels, btw?

Nobody asked for you to borrow your neighbor's computer to sign into his router. Just ask him to set a fixed channel. And then see if you pick a different fixed channel is a better result for you.

 

[sfx2000]

I use WiFi Analyzer to pick a free channel. After picking a channel, my neighbor's router switches its channel to the one I chose. It might take a few days for this to happen. The router is very close to my house, so my channel will suffer congestion as a result.

Any idea why this is happening, and if there is anything I could do to avoid this? There are plenty of free channels.

If the RSS is >20 dB, it's not a problem...

 

[agilani]

I use WiFi Analyzer to pick a free channel. After picking a channel, my neighbor's router switches its channel to the one I chose. It might take a few days for this to happen. The router is very close to my house, so my channel will suffer congestion as a result.

Any idea why this is happening, and if there is anything I could do to avoid this? There are plenty of free channels.

Stick with 5ghz ssid. Most routers will stick to what is it 1, 6, or 11 for the 2.4 ghz band? Its not a very broad spectrum and has longer range. Chances are almost always 100% that someone else will be using it in any area that has any decent level of population.

Also, are you sure its your neighbors router? Every amazon firetv i have that's connected via wifi broadcasts an ssid on the wifi channel its connected to for example. Easiest way to be sure is to check the mac address for the ssid in the mac address database and see which manufacturer makes it.

 

[noah way]

If you can, add high-gain antennas to the router. Then your neighbor(s) can worry about your interference.