Config mismatch and erratic wi-fi

General Wi-Fi Network Observations
1

Hi,
I’m having a problem with slow and erratic wi-fi. If I connect with ethernet the speed and performance is good, it’s just wi-fi within my home.
I’m using a SkyQ hub. I installed inSSIDer and it reported a configuration mismatch on both 5 GHz and 2.4 GHz, but I’m not sure what I should change in my router settings.
I’m about to email my .pcap file to support@metageek.com
Any advice you can provide would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks,
Jill

2

Hi Jill!

The things I would watch out for that could cause poor Wi-Fi performance:

  1. Poor signal strength
  2. Bad channel
  3. Client device (fancy name for laptop/smartphone/tablet/whatever your Wi-Fi device is) is connected on 2.4 GHz instead of 5 GHz
  4. Client device just has a cheap Wi-Fi adapter that doesn’t perform well

Regarding signal strength, the first thing to remember about “dBm” is that Wi-Fi is so low power, it works in the negatives. That means that -30 dBm is an extremely high signal strength, -60 dBm is good signal strength, -70 is where it starts to suffer, and at -80 dBm and lower, it probably won’t work at all.

If you want to learn more about signal strength, here’s some more info.

As for “bad channel”, you can learn more about how to configure better channels here.

We’ve also got a guide to help you get device up to the 5 GHz band.

We hope this helps! Thanks!

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3

Hi Jill,

Thanks for sending that .pcap over! The first thing I noticed is that all of your APs share the same channel. I would advise using channels 1, 6, and 11 in the 2.4 GHz band and using 42, 58, 155, and 138 in the 5 GHz band.

In addition to what Joel said, it looks like you might have too much coverage in some areas. When there are two or more APs above that -67 dBm threshold, a client device may not know which one to connect to, get confused, and drop-off. I discuss this further in this video here.

jill
jill1656×1330 321 KB

As for the config mismatch, it appears that one of your 5 GHz radios supports four spatial streams while the others support three spatial streams, resulting different max data rates. I couldn’t find out how your 2.4 GHz radios differ but it’s probably something similar. I wouldn’t be concerned since this isn’t something you can change and it doesn’t typically affect WiFi performance too much.

Finally, like Joel said in this third point, use of the 2.4 GHz band is typically the culprit of slow WiFi. I talk more about this in this video here.

I hope this helps!

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