So I started having some WIFI issues. Got a WIFI analyzer app for an old Android phone. (I use iPhones and they apparently don't have one). Anyway, I was on Channel 1 on my 2.4 network. The analyzer told me it was very congested and channel 6 was a good one. So changed to that. Everything has been fine for a couple weeks. Now starting to see issues again. Checked analyzer. Channel 6 has now become very congested and channel 1 is clear.
So it appears that most of the neighbors are using auto channel select???
Any thoughts on a good way to handle this? Should I just put mine on auto channel?
What wifi analyzer are you using? Is it aware of what your wifi ap is?
Have you tried WifiMan?
Is your wifi a single ap, or a few working together?
What is your TX Power set at?
What brand of wifi gear do you have?
It may seem counter intuiative, but if you can lower your TX power that may help some. Basically the goal is to reduce the airtime congestion. if you lower your power and their gear sees lower interference it may also reduce it's power as well. Auto on Wifi is horriable.
Also only use 1,6 or 11 and nothing inbetween. If you use a channel in between that will get and cause interference with anything on either side of the channels i listed earlier.
Depends on the flavor of Matter. Both generally use 2.4ghz Wifi though.
A higher transmit power doesn't nessacarily increase coverage. You have to remember that the communication is a two way street. Generally speaking Routers have a much higher power output then your portable devices like cellphones and tablets and such. So though your phone may be able to see the router easier, it may not be able to talk back to it easily. It is always a balancing act.
There is also the concern of if you want to drive traffic towards the higher bands it is better to lower the power to allow the client radio to transition to the higher frequency band more naturally.
That being said though if you only have a single wifi AP in your network, your options are limited, and generally speaking the higher transmit power will atleast give your router the best chance of a good connection.
Optimally it would be better if everyone lowered the transmit power to just what they need for indoor use or the coverage they need. That includes the neighbors. they would likely not loose much if any throughput with a lower tx power. It could even be better if everyone lowers the tx power to reduce interference with each other.
One big consequence of lower the TX power is that if you do have walls or obstacles that prevent transmission they very easily show coverage holes that need additional AP's to ensure connectivity.
In my Unifi setup i went back and forth between a multi AP setup and a single AP setup. The final best solution was a 4 AP setup that hast hte 2.4ghz band set as low as it can be. Then the 5 and 6hz bands are set in the middle of the power range. This arrangment was largely done to maximize good roaming between ap's and maximize devices on the 5 and 6ghz band if possible. When on a single ap setup the only option was to have it set to high. The downside to that was performance on the edge of the newtork sucked. It worked, but was fairly slow becuase othe 2.4ghz band having allot of interfrence, and just being stuck at the edge of the network and what the phy could do at thos ranges.
A lot to digest. I may not cover everything here, but try to answer all the above.
My router is an older TP-Linx AX3000. I can manually change the channel but in auto mode it will only change on a reboot. So That is not really of much help.
I did change back to channel 1 to see what happens. I also changed the bandwidth to 20. I don't have any real intensive stuff going on that speed would be much of an issue.
I am going to try lowering the power level. See what happens in the other end of the house. I only have the one AP. House is small enough never had a need for more.
I believe the problem has really started with fiber going in in our neighborhood. As more people hook up the fiber they are using the ISP's routers which are probably where the auto channel switching is taking place. Don't know that for sure, but a good guess. Most of the neighbors are non-tech and take what they get. I just had someone new move in right next door and they immediately signed up for fiber which the old neighbor didn't have. Their wifi signal here is very strong. (Maybe I could tinfoil that side of the house, :))
My Zigbee is on channel 25, power level 16.
I do have quite a few matter devices. My total connected devices show at 61. That is both wired, 2.4 and 5.
I do appreciate all the input. What's funny is I have a neighbor that works in IT. If I ask him a question about any of this he gets a blank look on his face. Kinda wonder what kind of IT dept he works for.
Honestly I learned allot about this as i started my Unifi journey. Before getting my Unifi I had the original Google Wifi 3 puck system and never thought about it. When I replaced that with Unifi, i had some interesting challenges that came up. I replaced it because of the wifi device count. That Google was wifi 5 wave 1 gear had a estimated support of 20-30 wifi devices per puck and max of about 90 on the whole network that the router puck could support.
It isn't something you really think about until you really dig into wifi networking. I have been in It for 30+ years, and started with a Linksys wrt G wifi router back in the late 90's..
Changing from a channel width of 40 to 20 could make a huge improvement on reducing interference. With a 40mhz channel width you were increasig your opprotunity for ore interfernece. With 20mhz channels the overlap spans 2 channels in either directioon. That is why the recommended channels are 1,6,11 but with 40mhz channel there is no way to even have 2 ap's on the 2.4ghz band without overlap. Generally start with smaller channel widths for reliability and only increase it when the airways allow and are fairly empty.
It makes sense that with allot of new installs having 40mhz chanels could start to cause issues. That change alone could make a huge improvement.
It would be interesting to know the physical location where their AP is related to their house and yours.
Just watching all the wifi's and channel hopping is rampant. Not sure how most routers handle it, but there are a couple that appear to change quite often. I believe the fiber company default router is the Eero.
Changed my power to mid. far end of the house seems to be ok so far. Will have to keep an eye on it. That is also the end of the house closest to the new neighbor.