I’ve been experiencing some odd WiFi behaviour over the last week or so. The main symptom is that at random intervals my signal strength will fade away to almost nothing; in addition I’ve experienced spells when my signal looks OK but bandwidth to the Internet is lousy. At times things are so bad that I can’t even stream audio from my PowerBook to the Airport Express (which is connected to my home theatre). The distance shouldn’t be an issue: 12 feet through a thin wall. (And it’s not the Mac: I see the same problems from my Amazon-supplied Compaq nc6000 when I use it at home.)
I downloaded a WiFi monitoring tool called iStumbler to see what was going on. Here’s part of the screen:
My network is chaucer (hat tip to Kate), and the base station is easily the nearest. But there are a lot of networks, as you can see (12 right now, at 1 A.M. – at 9 P.M. there are 15-20 active). Most access points try to use channels 1, 6 and 11 to minimize overlap; I’m guessing that my occasional signal loss occurs when my Airport Express decides that the channel it’s using is too crowded, and switches to another one.
The other odd thing is the presence of two networks crackhouse and ACTIONTEC. I think they’re relatively new. What’s distinctive about them is that they are always the strongest signals, and they run almost flat out all the time. I don’t know what the units are on the “signal” and “noise” columns, but chaucer‘s signal is typically in the range 35-45, crackhouse and ACTIONTEC are 55-65, and everybody else is under 35 (most under 30).
From the constant 24/7 load, I imagine that both those networks are being used for P2P file sharing or media download. If they’re connected to the Internet using the building’s cable service, this might explain the bandwidth issues too. But are the high signal levels significant? Should I try to find out who owns them and ask them to reconfigure? Hard to tell.
In any case, things seem to be working well right now…..