[TriLUG] WiFi quality monitoring

[Robert Dale]

I had a thinkpad that caused my netgear wifi router to degrade - it
wasn't just the wifi - and require a reboot after a few minutes. After
figuring that out, i turned the wireless off and wired in.

Have you tried with the laptop wired (with wireless hardware switch
off) and not have any issues? I would try turning off all other
wireless devices and have only the laptop on wifi. And then
systematically go through all your wireless devices until you find the
culprit. Also check the forums for your router to see if others had
issues.

To isolate the microcell, you could turn it off and have something
wired at the router and transfer data to something wireless.

Good luck.

On Thu, Aug 14, 2014 at 12:21 PM, Igor Partola <igor at igorpartola.com> wrote:
> I have a problem with my new Wi-Fi setup that I cannot make go away using
> the usual methods. The problem:
>
>  - Intermittent but high packet loss over Wi-Fi. This can last anywhere
> from 2 to 60 seconds where 5-75% of the packets are lost.
>
>  - Intermittent high ping times. Normally, I see ping times in the range of
> 2-3 ms, but about every 10-50 packets it jumps to 100-300 ms.
>
>  - Probably related to packet loss, but loss of speed. During normal
> operation I can easily see iperf speeds of about 80 Mbps. During slowdowns,
> I am seeing speeds of 2-3 Mbps. There are also times when I see speeds of
> around 20-30 Mbps for no good reason (no other device on the network is
> active).
>
>  - Random connectivity dropouts on iPhones/iPads.
>
>  - All of this happens on both 2.4 and 5 GHz networks.
>
> Things I tried/eliminated:
>
>  - My laptop normally sits 5 feet away from the router.
>
>  - There is only one other Wi-Fi network around me, on a 2.4 GHz band. I do
> have two Roku's which use Wi-Fi for their remotes, but when issues happen
> nobody is using them.
>
>  - I changed channels to several different values with no success.
>
>  - I monitored the noise and signal levels and they tend to fluctuate quite
> a bit.
>
> My current suspicion is that the AT&T Microcell is what's causing the
> issues, but I have no good way to prove it one way or the other. So the
> questions:
>
>  1. Can a GSM microcell intermittently interfere with 2.4 and 5 GHz Wi-Fi?
>
>  2. Is there an existing piece of software that can continuously monitor
> the quality of my Wi-Fi (signal, noise, ping, actual bandwidth via an iperf
> type test) for 24-48 hours? I'd like to run it with the microcell running,
> then again without it to see if that is in fact the issue.
>
> Thanks,
> Igor
> --
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-- 
Robert Dale