On 20/12/07 21:46:24, Adam Bower wrote:
On Thu, Dec 20, 2007 at 05:10:01PM +0000, Barry Samuels wrote:
Detached house in country lane. No other access points nearby. Of the others in your list we do have a cordless telephone in the same room as the computer. Would that have a marked effect?
Ok, what is your house constructed of? as you did mention something about some obstructions, if you live in a nuclear bunker or a building with 10ft thick granite walls that could explain the problem. :)
Damn! Now you've spoilt my surprise. :))
But seriously though - the house has wooden internal partition walls which include a 3 inch layer of fibreglass insulation.
Anyhow, after re-reading your post... you seem concerned at what the numbers say but are you actually having problems with the wireless lan? While i'm sitting here typing this on my network I have a link quality of 78/100 and I can get it to 94/100 if I touch the laptop to the access point but, I don't care what the numbers say as I have a 54 Mb/s connection and it works with little latency or throughput problems. Are you having any other problems or symptoms of a problem on your network?
Adam
This all started when I decided that I wanted to move my desktop from a room upstairs to a room downstairs but leaving my wife's desktop in the original room upstairs.
There is a telephone point in the upstairs room to which the router is connected and there is a wireless access point to accommodate my laptop. At present the two desktops are connected to the router with ethernet cables.
There is no telephone point in the room downstairs. Before I move my desk and computer downstairs I want to be sure that it can connect to the network reliably. I did some tests with the laptop in the room downstairs which gave a 55% signal quality with -67 dbm signal strength. I started a file transfer which ran at about 4-8 Mbs for a while then just stopped. Pinging the machine upstairs gave about 6 replies then stopped. I had to assume from those results that the laptop was on the very edge of it's working range. The laptop always gives a much better signal quality and strength than my desktop so I had to assume that the desktop just would work at that range.
On Wayne's reccommendation I had a talk with Solwise and I have to admit that they seem to be a very helpful company. If I purchased two HomePlug units (AV200) they volunteered to give me a full refund if they didn't work. So I now have two of those BUT our house has a two phase electrical supply and these units won't work across the phases (I tried) so they have to go on the same phase. This means that the nearest HomePlug unit is across the hall from the upstairs room.
I'm going to run a new telephone cable across the attic and down into the room with the HomePlug unit and move the router into that room which means that we have to either use wireless to connect my Wife's machine or try and use an existing telephone cable as a network cable to connect to her machine.
I have no means of testing the wireless connection between the rooms upstairs as I don't have a long enough ethernet cable to try it. I can put the WAP into that room and scan for a signal which is what those figures were all about.
I hope that all makes sense.