Poor Signal Strength?

[adgjqetuo]

Hello,

I'm hoping someone here can help me. I had an older Airport Extreme (about 5 years old) which recently crapped out on me. I wasn't the biggest fan of the product and didn't feel it reached adequately throughout my home, so I thought i'd try something different.

The guys at Best Buy were very adamant that I should buy another Airport Extreme - but thats what I was told 5 years ago and it didn't pan out as well so...idk.

Anyway, I thought i'd give the RT-N66R (Same as "U") a try. I really like the setup, it was miles easier then my airport and I was up and running in minutes flat.

My biggest problem is my signal strength - my home is on the larger side - built in 2000 and has three floors including the basement, about 1,200 sqft each w/ 9' ceilings. I tested both the 2.4 and 5 GHZ with my laptop. I also tested the 2.4 with my iPhone.

I rarely use my laptop, so the 5GHZ isn't as important, but my wife and I are always on our iPhones so the 2.4 is more important since they don't support 5GHZ.

Are my results normal? I was honestly disappointed and thought I should be getting better signal. It's not like it's a real old thick concrete or plaster walls.

Are there any settings I can tweak? I tried setting the TX strength to 200 on each band, but it didn't do much. Hoping someone can help me!

My router is in the 1st floor office on top of the desk shown - I can only have it there as all our comcast hookups from outside into the modem are there.


2.4 GHZ Testing

First Floor:

SecondFloor:

Basement:

 

[adgjqetuo]

5 GHZ Testing

First Floor:

SecondFloor:

Basement:

 

[thiggins]

Thanks providing the throughput maps. How did you measure the performance with the laptop, i.e. how did you get the Mbps readings? What wireless card does your laptop have?

The best thing you can do to improve overall coverage is to move the router to a more central location. You can use a pair of powerline adapters to get the router WAN connection from the Comcast modem to wherever there is an outlet.

I'm surprised your 5 GHz measurements are so good...even better than 2.4 GHz in
the same location in some cases. This is unusual.

 

[adgjqetuo]

I was using speedtest.net

The 5GHZ i'm mostly fine with - it's the 2.4 that feels very week (reading from both - the laptop and iPhone 4S). Is it possible the unit is defective?

I don't know what wireless card is in my laptop, but it's a Sony Vaio thats about 4-5 years old. It wasn't cheap in it's time and I believe has a decent card (2.4ghz , 5ghz and Bluetooth All in one).

Not sure why the 1st basement pic isn't working - the URL works but the forum won't show the picture.

EDIT:: Fixed.

 

[CaptainSTX]

More Testing

Relocating your router is probably the best idea without purchasing additional APs.

I would recommend that you test your LAN by running LAN speed tests instead of download speedtests to remove the variability of Internet download speed variations that are beyond your control.

With better and more consistent data from the test results you will be better able to evaluate the impact of making network changes.

 

[adgjqetuo]

I have conducted LAN tests - sorry for not mentioning that.

I consistently get 21-22mbps - I believe my comcast package is the 20mbps service.

 

[coxhaus]

If relocating your wireless to a central location does not work then you might try adding an additional wireless unit. I live in a very long one story house and could not find a one wireless solution no matter what I did. I finally added a second wireless unit at the other end of my house and now my whole house has wireless coverage for the first time. I bought a pair of Netgear powerline 500 Nano modules to locate my second wireless unit. You just plug them into the wall socket and you have Ethernet back to the router without running wire.

 

[thiggins]

I think what the Captain meant is that you should not use Internet-based testing to determine speed. You can use simple large file transfers or any of the tools here.
How Fast Is Your Network? Five Ways To Measure Network Speed

I'm asking about your laptop card because it determines the top link rate, which also provides a clue to your top possible speed.

What is unsatisfactory about the performance that you are getting? iPhones can't take advantage of the higher throughput that N300 and higher class routers can provide.

 

[adgjqetuo]

Thank you for the research material - I will look into it this afternoon after work.

I went back to a different Best Buy and talked with one of their "Network Guys" he said this router should have done me just fine, but also recommended the 5th gen Airport Extreme. Being he was an Android guy I figured i'd give it another shot.

I was able to get BB to discount the router $20 so I picked it up for $159 so it actually wound up cheapper then the N66R I returned.

I'm thinking maybe I can plug my old Exteme in an un-used kitchen cabinet somewhere and try to bridge them together and see if that helps any. Since my old Extreme is the 4th Gen and only has one band, I guess i'll bridge the 2.4ghz together since I use that stream more often with our smart phones.

This will save me money on buying an extender too.

I tried everything else, I guess this is my lasy resort?

1-3Mbps doesn't work well when trying to stream movies from my phone or work from home which I do often (believe it or not I usually work in my basement or kitchen - not my office - go figure!)

 

[rlcronin]

If relocating your wireless to a central location does not work then you might try adding an additional wireless unit. I live in a very long one story house and could not find a one wireless solution no matter what I did. I finally added a second wireless unit at the other end of my house and now my whole house has wireless coverage for the first time. I bought a pair of Netgear powerline 500 Nano modules to locate my second wireless unit. You just plug them into the wall socket and you have Ethernet back to the router without running wire.

After years of struggling to get coverage up to a 3rd floor room, this is exactly what I did as well and it worked great. I put in ZyXel 500 powerline units down by the router and up in the attic and hooked an old Dlink DPA1522 AP up to it, set it to the same network name as the router and put it on channel 11 (the router is on channel 1). Now I have coverage everywhere.

I do occasionally have a minor issue with an Android device that occasionally gets indecisive about which AP to connect to (leaving me wishing there were a way to adjust roaming sensitivity, e.g. so that it would hop AP's only when the signal strength difference between the two exceeds a certain threshold, but I haven't found anything that does that).

 

[adgjqetuo]

Interesting about the Attic - is that a better place to put it?

 

[RMerlin]

I thought I saw somewhere that Apple disabled support for 40 MHz channel width on the 2.4 GHz band. Unsure if it can be manually enabled, or if it's permanently disabled tho. The latter wouldn't surprise me with Apple.

 

[RogerSC]

I'm thinking maybe I can plug my old Exteme in an un-used kitchen cabinet somewhere and try to bridge them together and see if that helps any. Since my old Extreme is the 4th Gen and only has one band, I guess i'll bridge the 2.4ghz together since I use that stream more often with our smart phones.

This will save me money on buying an extender too.

I tried everything else, I guess this is my lasy resort?

1-3Mbps doesn't work well when trying to stream movies from my phone or work from home which I do often (believe it or not I usually work in my basement or kitchen - not my office - go figure!)

Don't know that I'd put an AP in a kitchen cabinet...maybe on a kitchen counter, or on top of a kitchen cabinet (we have space between the top of the kitchen cabinets and the kitchen ceiling), either of those would work better than a kitchen cabinet. But using an AP is a good way to get better wireless coverage for a large house. If you can't wire the AP directly to your router via an ethernet cable, you could look at powerline networking or MoCA (look it up *smile*) to create essentially a hard-wired connection to the AP. You could also play with using an ethernet bridge (not expensive) to connect an AP via wireless. Lots of possibilities here.

 

[adgjqetuo]

Ok - So I realize I'm now in the wrong forum because I switched over to the Airport Extreme, but here are my testing new results using www.speedtest.net: (I know, I know...)

I know this isn't a "True" test as someone posted earlier, I just haven't had time to sit down and look into the other methods yet. I used inSSIDer to pull the signal strengths during each test.

The 5Ghz band is acceptable to me - it looks like I good coverage mostly around the house. The 2.4Ghz on the other hand is god awful. Is it weird the upload rate is actually HIGHER then the download rate??

These numbers are from this morning before work, last night I didn't test upstairs, but the numbers were a little higher - I was getting around 8 Mbps standing next to the router in the office and 3 Mbps in the kitchen.

The only thing I can conclude is there has to be a lot of interference - I live in a development with lots of other houses and when running inSSIDer there is only one other 5GHz network, and about twelve other 2.4GHz networks. I sorted by channel and found that 3 and 7 were the only ones unused. Out of those two 3 seemed to work the best so I locked it onto 3. I also have the multicast rate set to "High" but the transmit rate set to only 10%. I tried all the different combinations with that as well and found "High" and "10%" appeared to work best.

One other thing - I sent over a 500mb packet internally from my wired desktop to my wireless laptop on the 5GHz network and it only passed at 10mb / sec. Is this a good transfer rate?

I can't find my wireless card name, but my laptop model is Sony Vaio VGN CR-420E (White version) - maybe that will help.

All this testing is WITHOUT extending the airport to anywhere.

Any thoughts would be great - I appreciate all the advice - sorry for the long response.

 

[frogger]

hello adgjqetuo,

did you leave inSSIDer open? If so that will influence your speeds.
so test it for your self.