[ale] WIFI mystery speed problems

Dustin Strickland dustin.h.strickland at gmail.com
Thu Feb 18 12:46:51 EST 2016


Try changing the channel. I'm not sure about your particular
router/firmware combo but in my experience the noise detection algorithm
for 802.11 broadcasts just sucks; in many cases a static channel setting
may be better than "automatic," though in some cases auto may work better.
How long was your setup working as expected before this started happening?

On Thu, Feb 18, 2016 at 12:31 PM, Steve Tynor <stevejunk at iintiip.com> wrote:

> I'm looking for some brainstoming ideas to explain why my home wifi
> router's performance is suddenly acting so strange: periodically (about
> once a day), performance (as tested by speedtest.net) drastically
> decreases from ~30Mb/s to ~4Mb/s.
>
> When this happens, there's nothing I can do to make it better.  Rebooting
> the router has no effect.  The speed comes back when its good and ready -
> not before.  These "outages" usually last about 12 hours.  Performance is
> bad from all clients - macbook, ubuntu laptop, phones - so this seems to be
> router specific - not due to client config.
>
> NOTE: tests via 10baseT wired connections are consistently at 29+Mb/s;
> wifi is 26-29 when good, when bad between 0.9 and 4Mb/s.  When the wifi is
> bad, the wired results remain good: so this is a wifi problem - can't blame
> it on comcast :)
>
> The router is an Asus RT-N16 running Tomato/Shibby.   Google shows others
> getting much better throughput with this hardware/firmware combo (70+Mb/s)
> so I don't think the router or firmware is likely to blame (unless I have
> flakey hardware ?)
>
> I've been logging through a speedtest-cli cronjob for the past week and 6
> days out of 7, I see this behavior (performance degrades starting between
> 9pm and 2am, continues even after the router auto-reboots at 5am and then
> eventually returns to normal by about 9am.
>
> Things I've tried:
>
>    - I cannot identify any equipment in the house that might be causing
>    radio interference - and certainly nothing that is on a periodic schedule
>    that matches these overnight outages.
>    - Reboot the router - has no effect.
>    - Checked that this is not client specific. When the performance
>    degrades, I measure the same throughput on all clients (laptops, phones).
>    - There is no load on the wifi during these outages (no long running
>    file transfers, backup rsync's or streaming).
>    - I disabled bandwidth and ip monitoring (which I understand to be a
>    known bottleneck in Tomato).  This improved the "normal" throughput a bit,
>    but has not solved the periodic slow "outages".
>    - I moved the router to a variety of locations (on theory that there
>    may be some unusual interference on one location or the other)
>
>
> I'm looking for ideas of more things to try before I reflash the original
> firmware and see if Asus's software works better... (followed by trash the
> asus and buy a new router :( ).
>
> Help! (and thanks,)
> Steve
>
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