Macs, Wireless, WPA and Drop-outs
Posted on March 24, 2006
Filed Under /dev/null/ | 53 views |
Yesterday I turned WPA encryption on my router and immediately degraded the hell out of the quality of my network, as can be seen from this bandwidth graph:
Those big gaps in the middle, they shouldn’t be there. That appears to be where something goes completely wrong on the router and it’s… resetting itself? No idea.
Stumbling around in the dark for solutions that wouldn’t require me to leave the network unencrypted I fired up iStumbler to take a look at what was going on around me. I live in a condo and since I’ve moved in I’ve noticed that the number of wireless networks has grown insanely. Two years ago there were two. Today:
I’m going to guess that 6 and 11 are the defaut channels for most routers.
Did switching to channel 3 solve the problem? It did not but at least now I have some room to myself.
Funny thing about this wireless networking issue: we see the very same thing happen in the office in Vancouver: stable for awhile and then it dies for about 30 seconds before coming back up and being stable for awhile. In Vancouver we’ve literally ripped out and replaced every single component of the network with no success, save for two factors at this point: encryption and Mac laptops.
Given the dearth of complaints on the Interweb about networks dropping out due to WPA I’m starting to lean towards something to do with Apple’s wireless implementation… MTU maybe…?
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