[ale] WIFI mystery speed problems

[Scott Castaline]

I have the AC66U and started experiencing the same thing with mine. The 
problem was mostly at night and on the weekends. I downloaded from 
Google Play an app that will monitor radio activity by frequency and 
channels. During the bad times I found a boatload of other APs on all 
various channels so being more selective on channel selection was not an 
option. With the app I was able to walk around the house and it would 
indicate where my signal strength would fade out and where it was 
exceptional. At this time my grandson informed me that his iPhone was 
remaining connected to my AP as far as 3 to 4 blocks away. I went 
outside and di some more scanning and noticed that the signal strength 
would peak outside and in directions where it would benefit my neighbors 
or cause more interference for them than it helped us. I then turned the 
router about 90 degrees and re-positioned the antennas which helped but 
the back of the house was still experiencing multiple dead spots. At the 
same time I ordered some new replacement antennas and once installed 99% 
of problems went away. If you want I could let you know which antenna I 
got with specs and where I got them.

On 02/18/2016 12:31 PM, Steve Tynor 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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