Horrendous Wi-Fi

Wi-fi at the family home is utterly horrendous whenever I visit and they tell me its like that all the time.

It's practically impossible to use the internet wirelessly as it is constantly disappearing, sometimes for half an hour at a time. This isn't device specific. Laptops , phones, tablets, TV whatever.

They are with sky using a BT landline and are not in a cabled virgin area.

They have no problems when connected to the net via ethernet, this having resulted in one lucky person getting to use the comedy cable that is 10 meters long just to get internet on the damn laptop.

I guessed it was a problem with the router (seems obvious) but brother said he tried another router for a while with no avail. I haven't had time to look into it when I've visited, all I did was hide the network and change its details. But they're at their wicks end now and I don't know how to help them. They should have contacted sky a year ago, but I would have to do that for them.

Is there anything I could do or is it in skys corner?

Scan the wifi channels and see which channel is the clearest (has the least number of SSID's broadcasting on it.).

There are apps for the scanning.

Log into the router and change channel it's broadcasting on.

Also do a speedtest on speedtest.net. Will give you an idea of what speed they're getting. If the speed is crap and ping is high then if there are lo0ads of devices trying to use it, they'll struggle.

MML

Will talk them through it and give it a go. I'll even check mine, our broadband crawls in the evening.

What would be a high ping?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Cosmicpore

What would be a high ping?

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Bra strap I'd say :-D

What are the walls made of? Using a wifi scanner walk around the house monitoring the signal strength. If you have very weak areas you can use homeplugs to extend the wireless, some have WAPs built in so its a neat all in one solution to add hotspots to various rooms.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by evilsatan

What are the walls made of? Using a wifi scanner walk around the house monitoring the signal strength. If you have very weak areas you can use homeplugs to extend the wireless, some have WAPs built in so its a neat all in one solution to add hotspots to various rooms.

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Will do that next time I'm visiting as the signal is definitely weak upstairs. However the issue they have at the moment isn't to do with the walls. The wi-fi is mostly used in the same room as the router.

My Mother can't use her wifi because she lives in flats and all the wireless routers in close proximity bleed all over each other. Do your folks live close to a lot of other people like this?

Not sure if you can do this with Sky but could you get a dual band router that broadcasts 5g as well as 2g and use the 5G signal.

The 5g will likely be less used and crowded.

I have seen this once before and it was a old boiler causing interference every time it came on
Moved the router away from the boiler cuboid fixed it

sounds like you have something interfering Cordless phone / Radio / microwave/ baby monitors and as above big appliances

Just a thought

They stay in a semi detached suburban house and I don't remember seeing all that many wifi signals when I was there, but I'll talk them through changing the wifi channel anyway to see if that helps.

As for something causing interference, the wall that the router is on is the joining wall, so who knows what could be on the other side causing interference. I wonder if it would actually be prudent to call sky, tell them about the issues and see if they can wire the router elsewhere in the house which would mean a new phone outlet/BT engineer coming over. But then perhaps that could also be achieved with a home plug.