WiFi SUCKS I Am Going Back to my wired connections.
Everyone jumped on board with Wi-Fi lickety split when it came out. And hey I am one of them. It was supposed to be the technology of the future – wasn’t it??
I ran my 802.11a when it was in draft and I thought it was really cool. And around the time 802.11b came out it actually became usable for surfing the net. Mind you it is at its best a 10 mbps connection and in all actuality it was a slight fraction of this. I had been suffering from horrible interference on my home phone and wifi and recently found a solution to the phone portion. If I could solve one problem why not the other. So I started changing channels on my router moving the base station and still I would go from a solid 54g connection to a crawl and then dead in the water until I do a repair. I updated wi-fi drivers, I flashed roms, I got repeaters, antennas I swear I did everything. We covered all the common wifi problems here if you want to look them over.
My poor Tivo and Media centers were the ones suffering (edit: alright its really me and the wife but hey show some gadget love) from no wi-fi love. I bit the bullet and ran some Cat6 Ethernet cable around the house and terminated a few jacks. I couldn’t be happier! I am back running 100mb to my tivo 1gbps to my Media center. Why should I sacrifice the speed, when I don’t have to?
Amazon un-box is actually cool now! As well as having my media files converted to Tivo and pushed to its now playing list is actually quicker than convert, burn and actually get up! I feel like i made the broadband jump all over Again!
My Media center box is super fast now… Torrenting away while it serves up media without a hick-up. Don’t get me wrong the laptops and Pdas all play nicey nicey with 802.11 g or better but i will only do wireless when necessary not as the standard. I also dropped a jack behind my couch so if my laptops wi-fi does me dirty again she will get plugged in as well!
When the dust settled I realized the interference on the wi-fi that remains is no longer bothering the connection and we are seeing our real 15mbps download speeds. Wow I feel like I am in the 21st century….
Oh wait I am! If only they had Jet Packs… Oh wait they do!
October 17, 2007 - 6:51 pm
My wi-fi at home is balky at times and proceeds to piss me off all the time. I’d love to go back to hard wired. So much easier.
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October 17, 2007 - 7:03 pm
i got fed up over a year ago and did the same thing. i leave wifi for when i need it and hard wired for all the other times.
what does balk mean?
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October 17, 2007 - 3:03 pm
i got fed up over a year ago and did the same thing. i leave wifi for when i need it and hard wired for all the other times.
what does balk mean?
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October 17, 2007 - 11:01 pm
I’m always trying to convince my co-workers to use the wired connections when they’re available.
WiFi is nowhere near as fast as wired and it will always be susceptible to external influences, especially competing wireless networks.
I’ve specifically had to block unprotected networks from other companies to prevent accidental connection.
To top it all off, wireless networks suffer significant performance degradation with high numbers of users.
Use them when they are necessary, not when they’re convenient.
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October 19, 2007 - 8:52 pm
I did exactly this, I had a d-link and it did not work with ‘buntu
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November 9, 2007 - 7:52 pm
It’s hard to get away from the microwave interference, but you can minimize cordless phone interference by getting a 5.8Ghz phone.
Also, if your hardware is supported, you can try flashing it with an open source firmware like DD-WRT. Doing that allows you to boost your transmission signal among other really cool things.
You can also try focusing the signal with a directional antenna.
I just hate to see people quit.
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April 30, 2008 - 3:41 pm
Actually I've found 2.4ghz WiFi to be tremendously flaky. This is wifi g & b. I suspect it's due to all the crazy interference due to 2.4Ghz being somewhat unregulated. 5Ghz Wifi A works like a charm but it is limited sadly in range.
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July 18, 2008 - 3:16 pm
You should go with powerline. Check it out at http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Su...“> “>http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Su...
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July 18, 2008 - 3:16 pm
You should go with powerline. Check it out at http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Su...“> “>http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Su...
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July 28, 2009 - 10:12 pm
wifi is really not that bad. The protocol is relatively rigid against interference, despite running at the terribly crowded and narrow 2.4 GHz band. What many are seeing is not a wifi problem but a WINDOWS problem, made even worse in some cases by shoddy drivers. The 2k/xp implementation is bad enough, but Vista and Win7 are even more flaky. One can try reducing the fragmentation threshold, RTS threshold, and using Vista anti-lag(in the case of Vista duh) if issues occur or distance is further than several feet. That seemed to help me with 2k/xp when I was dealing with them(went from totally unstable connection to very stable). It seemed to help Vista when combined with the antilag, the short time I kept it resident on my HDD.
However, using Linux these days on the same hardware in some cases, I have seen no such issue. My MacBook doesn’t have stability issues that need to be compensated for either.
To the other commenter, yes, wireless works fine in the *buntu family. I have been using it since Dapper. Drivers can be a trick to install in some cases(thank the mfr of these cards for only supporting Windows), but I have seen remarkable stability from the *buntu family and other Linux too. Currently posting from desktop 100 ft away indoors from cheap Dynex router, running Kubuntu 9.04. Signal is only moderate, but speed is ok(this is my farthest pc from router) and connection has been up for days straight =) btw, this is the infamously hard to get working Broadcom chipset(although it’s very possible for it to work well, as you can see). IMO, it’s not that hard once you read a few tutorials before beginning. Due to my previous experience with this chipset, had this one up in 5 mins or so.
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