Networks·41,451 discussions

Someone else’s wifi signal is stronger in our house than ours?

Tags: Windows

Trying to find out why our wifi signal drops so much from the office where the modem & router are to the living room or kitchen. I have run several different wifi analyzing apps and they all agree. However there is one SSID coming from outside somewhere that is on channel 6 that actually has better signal strength in my house than I do. How is this possible. I can sit in my living room and run the analyzer and it shows this SSID with better signal strength than my own. It also happens to be unlocked. We’re using a Arris SB6190 Modem and a Netgear AC1750 dual band router. Maybe this outside device isn’t affecting us or maybe it is. Asking your experts out there what I can do. Should I move to the same channel they are on?

Topic

Radio Propagation can be complicated

In reply to Someone else’s wifi signal is stronger in our house than ours?

But the most obvious answer to your question is that there is something between where your WiFi Access Point is and where you want to use it that is blocking the signal.

The most obvious things are Metal Shields, Electrical Wiring, Fluro Fittings, Microwave ovens, or it could be something as simple as the WiFi Access Point is on a different plane/level to the place you want to use it and the signal does not propergrate in that direction “Higher or Lower than the WiFi Access Point.”

You can try to reorientate the aerial and see if that makes any difference or change the position of the WiFi Access point till you get better results.

Interference

In reply to Someone else’s wifi signal is stronger in our house than ours?

It is hard to tell from a remote place, without being able to do any measurements and running tools, but it could be that the channel you are using is being interfered by another device. There are all kind of devices running in the 2.4Ghz band that are able to interfere, some that you don’t even would thing that would (Alarm sensors etc). The only way to tell is doing a spectrum analysis, but you’ll need the hardware for that. You could fiddle around with changing to other channels to see if there is some improvement. If you’re lucky and change to channel 6 the ‘rogue’ AP will detect your network and decide to move to another channel. That is depending on their configuration.

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