Wireless Internet/Weather

Weather may well be causing the speed of your connection to vary by affecting your signal to noise ratio.

quote:

SNR can vary on an hour to hour basis, not only is it affected by the speed of your connection but there are other things may reduce your SNR. Hot weather can cause a long line to expand. Wet weather on a connection somewhere could cause dampness and deteriorate the signal. Even street lighting and flashing xmas tree lights have been known to affect SNR

Changing SNR plus lots more for the technical readers.

PS I have just noticed your location - lots of weather in that part of the world

Many thanks for that link Roy.
low snr seems to be the cause. Mine came out at only 2dB when it is working! Have new faceplate on order, to see if it improves things.
Thanks again Mand

Please let me know if the new face plate works. I have just moved my modem/router and filter and now have them connected directly into the main BT socket thus bypassing about 30m of phone cable and was rewarded for my labour with a 2mb increase in speed.

Hi Roy
Tried snr at another time and got 4dB and 6dB later. Then re-read the link you sent and realised the figures are snr margin.
Fitting the faceplate is very easy and is much neater. Since then the snr margin is consistently at 6dB so it may have helped.In addition the cordless phone is abit clearer.
I have noticed more networks near me are on channel 1 or 11, so I,ve moved to 6 and the wireless connection seems much better.
I await the next bout of bad weather so see how it behaves.
Thanks Mand

Mand,

It would appear that you may have stumbled across the standard method of deploying 802.11 networks in a congested area.

Although there are 11 (in the US), available channels for 802.11, only 3 are commonly used, as they create a non-overlaping mesh of RF space. These are 1, 6, and 11.

However, although this gives the best results with no interference, it only allows three channels to be used. It is becoming more common that 4 channels are used, these being : 1, 4, 8, 11, as you only get about 4% interference, but a lot more channels to use.

RoyT,

Thanks for that tip, it reminded me I was going to put my router next to the master socket ages ago, i'll give it a go today as the positioning of my machines is now at the front of the house, rather than the back so I expect some increase!

As I am using a wired setup I have created a small office space at the front of the house and with the purchase of 7.5m of modem to pc connector things are zipping along at a fair pace. This works well and although not ideal it is something I can live with as a wireless setup is not at the top of my to do list.