Wireless Network Stability

Many of us are using wireless networks. But how can we solve the problem? We need to have a root problem spirit to solve the problems we encounter.

I. Stability of wireless networks:

What is stability? That is to say, the signal should continue to be good, and the signal strength should remain unchanged. Even if the signal is weak, the signal cannot be weak for a while, but not for a while. The stability of wireless networks should be considered in three aspects.

(1) wireless network stability-wireless device location:

The so-called wireless is wireless within a certain distance and range, so we cannot put the wireless router in a room hundreds of meters away and receive signals. Therefore, the placement of wireless devices in the entire room (the entire Wireless Network) is also a major factor that determines the stability of wireless signals.

Generally, the wireless router should be placed in the middle of the room, regardless of the signal coverage or transmission speed. Because the signal of the wireless transmitting antenna on the router is in a circular range, if the wireless router is placed in a corner of the room, half of the space is wasted, naturally, the coverage of wireless signals is seriously affected, and the range of wireless networks is also changed from the entire circle to half a circle by default, greatly reducing the wireless performance.

In addition, there are many wall corners in our room, each corner will affect the transmission of wireless signals, so we should try to avoid the corner when designing wireless networks and equipment placement. This is consistent with the above description of placing wireless devices in the center of the room. The author once put his notebook behind the living room TV, while the wireless router is placed in the study, the wireless signal transmission route needs to pass the study and the living room two corners, and finally through the TV, even if the extended 54M is used for transmission, no signal can be received.

The last thing to note is that when we place wireless devices in the corner of the room, the whole room must be covered by wireless signals, and the signal is stable, however, because your wireless device is in the corner of the room, especially the residents of the building will receive wireless signals from other apartment and neighbors, the combination of multiple wireless signals naturally affects the stability of their own signals. So the best way is to place the wireless router in the living room or the center of the room.

(2) wireless network stability-wireless routers themselves:

Due to the many brands of wireless routers, the price difference is also very large, coupled with some foreign products, such as not satisfied, resulting in a great difference in the stability and functions of the wireless router itself. When your wireless network signal is unstable and there is no problem with the placement of the wireless router, we must first consider the problems of the wireless router itself.

In this case, we can take the notebook close to the wireless router, or take the wireless router near the PC with a wireless Nic to reduce the distance to view the stability of the wireless signal. If the connection speed and signal strength are still unsatisfactory, you need to check the stability from the wireless router. The most common method is to download the latest patch package or firmware driver on the official homepage of wireless product manufacturers.

The upgrade method is particularly effective when the wireless router signal is unstable or the wireless network card is automatically dropped every few minutes.

(3) wireless network stability-wireless network adapter itself:

Like a wired network, you need to check the wireless network card if the network is still unstable when the wireless router is no problem. Wireless Network card problems are mainly caused by the following two aspects.

First, it is the driver problem of the wireless network card itself. Be sure to install the wireless network card with the drive on the disk, and do not use the driver for win98 to XP or 2000 during installation. The author once to their Lenovo notebook installation of TP-LINK driver directly with automatic scanning disc form, the results of the scan to the driver installation will crash, repeated tests of the failure is still. In the end, we found that the driver automatically scanned by the CD was for win98, but the XP driver in another directory on the CD was not automatically scanned. Therefore, the problem was solved after the driver was manually installed. Therefore, whether the driver is correct or not and whether the driver is an official version is the main factor that determines the stability of the wireless network.

The second is the connection speed of the wireless network adapter. It is well known that in a wired network, when two computers transmit data, if the network adapter of a computer is set to a ticket or the transmission speed is 10 M, the NIC of another computer is duplex or the transmission speed is 100 mb. In this case, the two NICs frequently negotiate the connection speed and working mode, and cannot be transmitted normally or frequently disconnected. This is also true for wireless NICs. Some users may set the transmission speed to 54M on the wireless router, but their wireless NICs only have a transmission speed of 11 m, at this time, the working frequency and mode of the two will cause slow or unstable connection speeds. This is why we recommend that you choose a set of products when purchasing wireless devices, after all, the set products are compatible with each other in terms of connection speed and working mode.

TIPS:

Of course, the transmission speed of many brands of wireless network cards can be adjusted by themselves, that is to say, not only the 11 m and 54M modes work, he will automatically adjust and select a suitable speed for transmission based on the current wireless signal and wireless network conditions. This is the case with the author's T43 notebook, this function reduces the impact of unstable wireless networks due to inconsistent working speeds of wireless NICs.

Ii. Stability of wireless signals:

We have discussed how to improve the transmission speed and stability of wireless routers and wireless network adapters. In practice, there are many factors that affect the stability and connection speed of wireless signals. The following are some introductions for readers.

(1) wireless network stability-reduces band interference:

When we release a wireless network, we will select a frequency band. Theoretically, too many wireless networks in the same frequency band will seriously affect the signal strength, that is to say, if your home uses the same wireless signal frequency band as your home's wireless signal transmitting frequency band, the two wireless networks will be affected to some extent. Therefore, changing a signal transmission frequency band through a wireless router is a good method when the network is unstable.

TIPS:

Multiple APs and multiple wireless routers do not interfere with each other as long as the SSID name and frequency band are different, which naturally does not affect your data transmission. Interference occurs when too many wireless networks exist in the same frequency band.

(2) wireless network stability-reject DHCP packets:

Experienced users know that the DHCP service can help us automatically allocate IP addresses of computers on the network. However, in actual use, DHCP can cause network instability, for example, if the IP address is obtained again after the lease, other computers in the network are using the IP address, or DHCP information is frequently negotiated between the computer and the wireless router. In fact, these DHCP packets are completely unnecessary. For home users, there are not many computers in the network. We can completely reduce DHCP packets by manually setting network parameters such as IP addresses.

A friend once told me that the wireless network in his house was unstable. Later, no DHCP was needed to directly specify an IP address and no longer dropped.

(3) wireless network stability-speed reduction:

First, let's take a look at this example. I made up a wireless network with my neighbors. He is a D-Link wireless router. I am a netcom Wireless Bridge and have frequent disconnections recently, the connection speed is also slow. After checking, I found that I don't know when another Linksys device (the Linksys signal is strong) will occupy channel6. As long as the device is on, it will affect the connection quality, the original ping packet loss rate soared from 1% to 50%. Then, we changed the frequency band of the transmitting signal to channel1. Who knows that two channel1 devices are nearby, and then channel11 actually has five wireless devices. How can this problem be solved?

The above example has been met by the author. It can be seen that wireless networks are very popular now. Due to mutual interference between wireless networks in the same frequency band, 13 frequency bands are not enough for big use, how can this problem be solved? Generally, wireless routers have the function of Automatically Selecting the frequency band. If not, you can change the working mode of your wireless device from 802.11g to 802.11b. Although the speed is reduced, it brings stability benefits. Therefore, reducing the transmission speed can make our wireless network more stable.

Summary:

The tips described above are only summarized by the author in practice. I hope they will be helpful to all IT168 readers. After all, it is our hope that wireless networks in our home will become "unlimited. Now that we select wireless, we need to complete the wireless connection.