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Question

Signal strong, throughput awful: why?

by Dec 4, 2015 3:24PM PST

I work far from home, and rent a room where I stay during the week. I'm having a problem using my laptop with a WiFi router owned by the person I rent from.

I've had long-standing problems in this situation. Originally I got two or three bars on Windows' signal strength meter, and I periodically lost the connection for no apparent reason. When that happened I was sometimes able to recover by reconnecting. More often I had to reboot. Sometimes rebooting didn't help, and I had to wait for the computer to re-establish a connection on its own, anywhere from minutes to hours later.

A couple of weeks ago the router and modem were replaced by a new combined router/modem. My signal strength went from 2-3 bars to 4-5 bars. My connectivity went from "often fails" to "occasionally works." I no longer lose connections, but throughput is usually close to zero. Loading a typical page from a site like amazon.com or yahoo.com takes five minutes or more when I can do it at all. Usually the browser times out before I get there. I'd estimate that I get enough throughput to load pages consistently about 5% of the time.

I see no improvement when I try to use the connection in the middle of the night, so I don't think anyone is hogging the channel. I tried to connect with another laptop recently issued to me by my employer and had the same problem, so I don't think the problem is on the client. I have the problem with every communication program I've tried, including two different browsers (Firefox and IE), so it's not an ill-behaved application.

I spoke to one of the other two tenants about this. He said he doesn't own a computer but he connects to the Internet via WiFi from a Kindle, and he has no problems.

I tried using the Internet from my Kindle. I too had no problem. I tried loading several different web sites from each device in turn with the devices within inches of each other. Each time the Kindle connected nicely, and both computers had the problems described above.

I've considered what "smoking gun" property the two laptops might share, but I don't see it. My personal machine is a Lenovo T410, built in 2010, with Windows 7 Professional installed by Lenovo and other software chosen and installed by me. The work machine is a Toshiba Z50, built in 2015, with Windows 7 Enterprise installed by Toshiba and other software chosen and installed by my employer's IT department. Given the differences in source and age, I assume that the WiFi and other peripheral chips are all different.

What should I look for, and how?

Discussion is locked

4 Posts
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Answer
Check Channels.
by Dec 4, 2015 6:14PM PST

have a smart phone? If so download a wifi checker such as "wifi finder". With this you can see which "channels" are in use and which are under used. I suspect you are using the "default" setup which is what most everyone is using. The Kindle may have been setup to use a different channel.

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Wifi Analyzer by farproc for Android
by DSHornet Dec 4, 2015 6:43PM PST

There is a great app called Wifi Analyzer by farproc that will show you which channel your router is on and whether it's fighting other nearby routers or access points. I had a similar problem with slow wifi in spite of a strong signal unless I was very close to my own router. When I installed this app on my HTC phone and my Nexus 7, I could see I was sharing a channel with five neighbors. I got into my router setup and manually switched to an unused (by anybody else) channel and the problems cleared up.

There are other similar analyzers available in the Google Play store, all free. Check them out.

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Answer
There are a couple of issues here
by Dec 5, 2015 9:16AM PST

Hi, I'm in the middle of a similar situation here in Australia and I think we are close to our answer. But based on what I've been doing, there are a couple of things you need to check. There are two parts to your internet connection, the WiFi connection to the router and the service provider link from router to the Internet.

Check the WiFi channel load with a smartphone WiFi analyser, as suggested by an earlier poster. A noted, a heavily congested channel can be an issue but you'll need to get the router owner to change it if so.

Next thing is to check your local WiFi link. Luckily, you have two computers available so pick a fairly big file and transfer it from one computer to the other, using the WiFi link - you might need to get your company IT guy to enable file sharing if it isn't already. If the file is big enough, use a stopwatch to time it or you could write a little batch file to display the time, copy the file and display the time. Your T410 should have an 802.11n network interface card in it, so you should be looking for something approaching 10-15 megabytes per second, depending on what's between you and the router.

Next, check the router to Internet connection. Find a speed testing program on the web, I use speedtest.net here, which runs in a browser. If it's available where you are, it's as good as any. Load it in your browser and it displays a laptop image with a test start button at the top. It picks a local server based on ping time, then does a download and up load test. The download speed is the one you are interested in. The maximum would be the nominal service speed from the ISP (you won't achieve this!). What you will achieve is related to the distance your router is from the ISP web server and the network congestion. It sounds like it would be interesting to compare that with what you can get from your kindle, assuming it can run speedtest.

You should now know where your problem lies. For what it's worth, I have an ADSL2+ service, nominal 20 Mbits/second. I'm 4 km (2.5 miles) cable run from the Telstra exchange and the maximum speed I can achieve is 5.8 Mbits/second. But network congestion (the whole load on the exchange) degrades this to as little as 1.6 Mbits at busy periods (thanks Facebook and streaming services!). I get around 130 Mbits/second on my internal n-class WiFi network (22 metres, open plan house).

From what you've said, I suspect you have local WiFi channel congestion but then I still think this networking stuff is cocoa tins and wet string!

Good luck!

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Answer
Had this problem
by Dec 5, 2015 1:50PM PST

Recently my landlady got an ISP account replacing mine. Prior to the change one computer using Wi-Fi worked fine.
With the new account we got a new combination router/modem. The Wi-Fi connected computer had good connection, but no throughput - exactly what you described. Since I still had my older combination box, I kept it connected so the computer could have Internet access. A repairman checked using his mobile devices and didn't have any problem. He could not seem to understand that the older combo box worked, but the new one didn't.
I finally got another repairman who at least listened to what I was saying. It seems the old combo box had a single Wi-Fi mode, but the new one had two - one for closer items and the other for distant items (I don't remember the numbers, though). Although he didn't think it would make any difference, he brought a single Wi-Fi modem (updated version of the one I had). He changed the router's channel to 7. That solved the problem; although the default channel 1 would have probably worked, 7 gave a better connection.
Since your landlord recently upgraded his combo box, that could very well be your problem. You can check by using URL 10.0.0.1 and signing in with the default user (Admin) and password (password). Check the Wi-Fi settings. This can be done from your computer, unless your landlord followed proper security procedures and changed the user and/or password.

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