18 ms·

Avery’s laws of Wi-Fi reliability

170 points by colinprince 9y ago

peterburkimsher 9y ago
1. Replacing your router (or firmware) almost always fixes your problem. 2. Adding an additional router almost always makes things worse. Solution: Switch off nodes when they stop working. My house has this problem. I live on the 4th floor, next to the main VDSL router. The kitchen & living room on the 2nd floor can't get a strong WiFi signal. After some thought about WiFi repeaters, I decided to buy a long Ethernet wire and run it down the stairs. I trip over it sometimes, but it's basically reliable. The downstairs router runs dd-wrt, and works fine 99% of the time (I've had to reboot it once in the past year). The upstairs VDSL router is owned by the telecom company (Chunghwa), and they don't give me administrator access. I can't change the firmware, and the box is frankly awful. About 6 months ago we complained repeatedly, asking them to replace the box. They sent tech guys, who tested the wire, and said that everything is fine. Indeed, it works about 70% of the time. But very often I come home from work, and I have to reboot that router before I can get online. My solution is to buy a Edimax WiFi power socket and a Raspberry Pi, which checks to see if it's online. When the network goes down for more than a minute, it'll automatically tell the WiFi power socket to turn the router off and on again. I know that power-cycling is bad for the router, but I don't see any other solution given the software constraints. I'm also surprised that there are no companies making devices for the purpose of power-cycling routers.
- gav 9y ago
  Megatec make a few devices for power cycling routers: http://www.megatec.com.tw/info.htm http://www.megatec.com.tw/info.htm I've not tried one and at around $75 they aren't cheap. I was looking into them at a time when my cable modem would forget how to route anything and need to be power cycled, but replacing it did the trick.
  - gwern 9y ago
    I am both awed and dismayed that this is a thing.
  - Johnny555 9y ago
    Here's another one: http://resetplug.com/ http://resetplug.com/ And here's one that resets based on a timer rather than Wifi signal: http://www.netreset.com/ http://www.netreset.com/ And another one that uses ethernet: https://www.amazon.com/3Gstore-Remote-Power-IP-Switch/dp/B01GOOE8OY/ https://www.amazon.com/3Gstore-Remote-Power-IP-Switch/dp/B01...
    - peterburkimsher 9y ago
      Thank you so much for finding existing products! I'm certainly going to buy one of these. ResetPlug is for WiFi, but hasn't posted anything since 2016 (I'm a bit worried that it might not exist any more). Megatec ezPower is in Taiwan (local for me), but is only Ethernet. Often the Ethernet still works even when the WiFi doesn't, so I'll try to get the ResetPlug first.
  - kalleboo 9y ago
    My parents just used one of those old school mechanical socket timers and had it shut down for 5 minutes every morning at 4 AM. Might not work for you if you have long-running connections you need to maintain...
- m-j-fox 9y ago
  You, sir, are a badass. You should sell wifi power cycling sockets. I will be your first customer.
- Johnny555 9y ago
  2. Adding an additional router almost always makes things worse. While I wouldn't add another router, I've found that adding additional AP's almost always makes things better, assuming they are not on overlapping channels.
  - cbhl 9y ago
    I've seen Google Wi-Fi installations where someone adds three APs in a tiny urban apartment, and removing one actually improves signal and throughput.
    - lstamour 9y ago
      I've had that happen, the trick is to place them on the other side of large metal objects (like in rooms behind fridges) or with as many walls between them as possible. It really does come down to placement and how many Wi-Fi hotspots your neighbours run. It's theoretically possible that your 3 Wi-Fi hotspots could run at channels 1, 6 and 11, and try to pin devices to each channel, while still working in one room. But if you've limited Wi-Fi spectrum available, adding more APs isn't going to help things unless they're carefully tuned to transmit with less power/interference.
  - Yizahi 9y ago
    Except when for some reason roaming don't work for that certain device during full moon. Or after power outage it will boot but not properly and router will work and AP won't. Or AP kinda works, WiFi part at least but there is no internet there for whatever reason. In my case it is a clear case of multiplying problems.
    - Johnny555 9y ago
      If you have a strong enough signal that adding a new AP is not neccessary, then you don't need to roam. If you have multiple AP's and can't roam between them, you're no worse off than if you had one. If you have malfunctioning hardware, then you're going to have problems whether you have one AP or multiple AP's -- use better hardware.
- danieldk 9y ago
  I decided to buy a long Ethernet wire and run it down the stairs. I trip over it sometimes, Why not use Powerline Ethernet? In most houses, it's typically fast and reliable and requires no extra wires. E.g. the data rate between my desk and router is currently 784 Mbit/s.
  - peterburkimsher 9y ago
    Price. $1500 (50 USD) for power-line Ethernet, $300 (10 USD) for a wire. And the lower latent power consumption, and the fact the wire is less likely to be the cause of any problem. I'm renting the house, and wherever I move next probably won't have this problem.
  - therealidiot 9y ago
    These are good but if you have any analog audio/video kit nearby (or if you listen to shortwave radio) you'll hear them. Also, avoid TP-Link adapters as they seem to have some issue coming out of powersave mode that means I have to ping something all day to prevent them from sleeping
  - ht85 9y ago
    Powerline is a crapshoot, at least as much as Wifi. I installed several different models a few years back, for me and some friends/family, and in every case ended up finding another solution as they would just add another layer of unreliability. Cheap ones suffer from the same problems as cheap routers, randomly hanging and requiring a physical plug / unplug when the room gets hot, or whatever other interferences degrade their performance over time. Expensive ones are still not 100% reliable, and most of the time will cost more than a well done ethernet installation.
    - danieldk 9y ago
      Never had any problems in three different houses. Two different brands (we use AVM Fritz!PowerLine now). I reliably get high bandwidth and low latency. A gave an old set of adapters to my parents in law who live in an older house (from the 1930s) and it works well for them as well. Of course, as a sibling said, it'll depend a lot on the wiring and/or other connected devices. So I guess it's best to try with a borrowed pair of adapters first.
- Ded7xSEoPKYNsDd 9y ago
  How warm is it at your place? I've been quite successful avoiding router lock ups by adding some active cooling: take an old PC fan, solder it to the power wires of an old USB cable, connect that cable to the router (assuming your router has an active USB port).
  - peterburkimsher 9y ago
    Taiwan: so hot right now. 32ºC in the day, 26ºC at night. I've often speculated that the temperature is causing problems, which would also explain why it's hard to reproduce the issue when a telecom service tech comes over. I'll have a look around for a suitable fan, and see if that helps.
  - crystalclaw 9y ago
    I did this on one of my APs that fails frequently (locks up and the front lights go off, signal strength randomly goes down to about 8 feet with no obstructions, etc) and it helped immensely. unfortunately, it didn't /solve/ the problem for me, just made it better. I've ordered some unifi stuff on recommendation from friends. hopefully that'll live up to the hype and do the job.
- keithpeter 9y ago
  "After some thought about WiFi repeaters, I decided to buy a long Ethernet wire and run it down the stairs." Would some of those 'homeplug' plugs that use the mains wiring as a closed circuit low frequency radio signal link be tidier? I used a fairly low speed pair to get Internet from modem/router downstairs to desktop PC upstairs without drilling holes and running cable. Worked ok. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HomePlug https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HomePlug
  - LogicX 9y ago
    No, I bouht some recently to experiment: Always about 10% packet loss (yes, i was on the same circuit, packet loss was much worse across circuits)
    - keithpeter 9y ago
      fair enough. Cable ties on the side of the stairs then - don't want any accidents.
      - corobo 9y ago
        or even use those cable clip things and run the wire along the ceiling/floor, paint the lot the same colour as the wall
- hyperdunc 9y ago
  Why is power cycling bad for the router?
  - ysleepy 9y ago
    It isn't. The OS is only mounting the flash writable on configuration changes. Hard rebooting it is expected and designed for.
- Yizahi 9y ago
  This is how it always ends - wired ethernet where you can and rebooting malfunctioning wireless devices (or all of them if unsure). Why can't we have nice things?.. Good idea about automation, I try it at home.
untangle 9y ago
I don't know who this analysis is aimed at but I would advise caution in trying to apply it. My main criticisms of the article are that it: (1) ignores modern wi-fi mesh technology; (2) oversimplifies "solutions" to the point of false equivalencies; (3) ignores performance and convenience concerns; (4) uses vague language ("it works"); and (5) treats "wi-fi" as a black box that operates in a vacuum and is not amenable to tuning (channels, power levels, freq's, etc.). Ironically, the author's "buddy wi-fi" proposal embodies a subset of the capabilities of a current consumer mesh setup such as the Amplifi product that I use in my 3-story home.
- brians 9y ago
  What's true about modern meshes that obviates the conditional probability of success? This'll be news to me!
  - exelius 9y ago
    Modern meshes still often have a choke point. Kill enough nodes at the right point in the mesh and the reliability degrades quickly as the backhaul links get oversubscribed. At least that's what I think OP meant :)
    - lstamour 9y ago
      Intriguingly, I think my Google OnHub devices use spanning tree to find Internet across the mesh. I actually wired up both rather than use mesh networks on their own, though, and a bug in my Cisco wired switch's use of spanning tree was what caused problems -- despite having the cables connected, and ethernet running just fine between them, the spanning tree figured transmitting over wireless from one OnHub to the other would be faster than the ethernet switch between them. (The fix was to disable broken, manual spanning tree settings on the Cisco switch.) This indicates to me that if you had a dozen Google Wi-Fi devices and a few of them had ethernet connections, the rest would quickly find the shortest path from your device to the AP you're connected to the nearest mesh device with the fastest ethernet to the outside world. I'm not sure how the hops are weighted though, presumably reliability and signal strength plays a role.
jv22222 9y ago
After 20 years of buyin (15+ routers) and searching for a wifi router that "just works"TM in large house scenario I finally found the ASUS AC5300. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0167HG1V6/ https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0167HG1V6/ It has 3 radios on board 2x5ghz and 1x2.4ghz. It has a mode that allows you to use a single ssid across all 3 radios. It uses QOS to dynamically switch each devices to the best radio for at any moment. I purchased the same device for a small retail business and it works amazingly well in that setting too. Highly recommended.
- Foxhuls 9y ago
  I've really been enjoying my Ubiquiti setup that I switched to about 5 months ago. The internet has still gone down but that is due to my ISP and not the hardware.
  - adamst85 9y ago
    +1 for Ubiquiti Unifi. Got 2 AP's and a Router and it has been great with no issues so far (3 months). Upgraded as my previous combo router (with OpenWRT Gargoyle) would silently stop allowing wireless devices from connecting to the 2.4ghz at seemingly random intervals.
  - exelius 9y ago
    Ubiquiti can get expensive for a home user, but yeah. It's rock solid gear, truthfully advertised and still a bargain at that price point.
    - eltoozero 9y ago
      Not expensive, a single UAP-AC-PRO is maybe $125, add a mikrotik hEx RB750GL and you're golden. The 802.11N Unifi gear is <$200 for a three-pack and works of MikroTik passive PoE like the RB260, 5-port gigabit PoE with an SFP cage. MikroTik and Unifi is an unbeatable performance/price combo for individuals, large homes and business scaling up to medium sized and multi-site deployments. With those prices and features you can affordably dog-food the setup and support your friends and family.
StillBored 9y ago
Personally I think a big problem are all these 3 in 1 type modem/router/wifi solutions and the inability to debug which part is causing problems. These devices a less expensive but seem to always compromise some functionality. What that is, is rarely evident from the box/review/manual. For a long time now, I've always recommend to people to buy standalone cable/DSL modems and figure out how to get the analog signal strength/error correction/retry counters from them (and return it if you can't get them). Then spend the time replacing connectors in your house and getting the modem as close to the curb as possible. Then pick a good wifi solution, and tweak that until its as clean as possible. Wifi and modem standards evolve at different paces, and its silly to upgrade your modem or router every time you want a newer wifi standard, or for that matter change your wifi to get a newer cable or DSL modem.
- legulere 9y ago
  Or just buy something of quality like AVM Fritz!Box, which has quite good diagnose utilities on board
  - voltagex_ 9y ago
    It depends. The Fritzboxes that were sold in Australia had an ADSL chipset in them that wasn't very good at handling noisy lines (you're very, very lucky if yours isn't). Your best bet is/was to buy a device with a particular Broadcom chipset in it that was good at handling noise. The difference it made to my connection speed was from syncing at 4 megabit downstream to syncing at 10 megabit downstream. This steadily degraded to 8 megabit over the next few years, but what are you gonna do?
capitalsigma 9y ago
Only tangentially related -- I swear, nothing makes me feel more technically incompetent than debugging WiFi issues. I do moderately low level systems programming all day long, but I can't get the damn internet to reach from my living room to my desktop computer?
- Qub3d 9y ago
  I mean, the fact that WiFi works at all is amazing. We're encoding information--lots of it, too--and sending it through light forms of energy ripples through the air, which we can then decode. All of this happens at a sub-millisecond rate. Technology is amazing, and we can sometimes forget that [0]. I wouldn't treat yourself harshly because you don't fully understand it. [0]:https://youtu.be/zbCoe3vIskA?t=40s https://youtu.be/zbCoe3vIskA?t=40s
  - scrollaway 9y ago
    That was a really wholesome comment :) As someone who feels a lot like the GP, thank you and you're absolutely right.
LobsterY 9y ago
This is a great illustration of why the naive belief that a microservice architecture will solve all the things is so ill-conceived. When developers fail to properly assess how deeply coupled microservices are to their dependencies, the result is cascading failure scenarios that take down the whole ecosystem. Perhaps we should aim for 'services' architecture that are just right. When two concerns are deeply coupled/dependent on one another, the ecosystem will likely be more robust if these are left together in a single service. In addition, this adheres to good old fashioned software design principles of striving for good coupling/cohesion relationships.
- bsder 9y ago
  > <insert buzzword> will solve all the things This is the failure irrespective of what <insert buzzword> is. However, in my opinion, microservices are about decoupling rather than reliability. In addition, proper use of microservices means that people producing for and consuming from a microservice now MUST plan for how to detect when it is down and what to do when that microservice is offline.
deleted 9y ago
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amiga-workbench 9y ago
I run a Microtik Routerboard and a few Ubiquiti Unifi AP's. Never had a peep out of it with over a years uptime now. The problem seems to be shitty consumer grade hardware (isn't it always), I'd advise upgrading to entry-level business grade gear, it's much more reliable.
- jdblair 9y ago
  +1 for the MikroTik routerboard. My 2011UiAS-2HnD has been running great for 2 years. Caveat: the configuration UI complex! It's easy to set up a basic configuration. More complex features (vpn, port forwarding, custom firewall) are arcane, in the same way configuring a Cisco router is arcane. But those complex features are available!
  - amiga-workbench 9y ago
    Yep, the quick setup will handle a standard residential configuration for you, but if you want failover or load balancing things get more complicated.
- AnAfrican 9y ago
  Mikrotik is also as cheap as it gets.
  - amiga-workbench 9y ago
    Yeah, but cheap in the same way as a refurbished ThinkPad, not cheap as in poorly quality.
- pixl97 9y ago
  >The problem seems to be shitty consumer grade hardware Partially.... Yes, consumer grade hardware sucks, but so do consumers. When you see a wifi router in a corner, partially covered in junk (or blocked by household stuff), and it's power brick is sandwiched between 5 devices and is running about 150 degrees, it's not really the hardwares fault. People that tend to install pro-sumer/commercial equipment tend to plug things into UPS's with proper ventilation and center of the room mount their AP, leading to a far reduced number of incidents.
captainmuon 9y ago
This is a good insight, especially the diagram at the top. But the quesion for me is, why is a router broken say 10% of the time? I think the problem is that WiFi is totally undebuggable. When it doesn't work, you don't see at which stage it doesn't work. - Do the frames in the air get corrupted or dropped? What portion of frames makes it through? - I see the SSID, so it can transmit something. Why can't I connect and get at least a slow connection? - What is it doing now, sending, waiting for a response, did it negotiate encryption yet? - Is the low-level connection OK, and we have a problem with DHCP? This you can detect, but the OS obscures it from you. - There is no easy way to see signal strength. You get a more or less meaningful number reported from the card, but these nice diagrams showing signal strength over frequency? Mostly fake, this is just the reported signal strength of each channel, smoothed out to look like a continuous scan. If we had a continuous scan, we could see individual sources of interference better. - Why does the connection suddenly drop out or get slow? Is the problem on my side of the router, or on the internet side? Are buffers full/empty? Is some object standing in the way, or is is a weather phenomenon? You can ping your router or modem, and some routers have nice tools to let you see graphs of upstream and downstream. But there is no coherent debugging solution.
- nisa 9y ago
  > why is a router broken say 10% of the time? My guess would be that WiFi drivers are kind of quirky - if you follow OpenWRT/LEDE development there a lot of issues that appear only on heavy load or under certain situations - causes range from driver bugs / chip bugs / firmware bugs - most of the stuff is NDA or closed source. You've got the problem on both sides - especially the situation on Linux is still dire for lot's of chipsets. Even my years old intel card in my notebook does not really work well with Linux und the current kernel/firmware. I blame the vendors. > Do the frames in the air get corrupted or dropped? What portion of frames makes it through? That also depends on the rate and encoding that the frames are sent. Then there is stuff like frame aggretation that sometimes work sometimes not. > I see the SSID, so it can transmit something. Why can't I connect and get at least a slow connection? SSID is send with the lowest rate (1Mbit) and with the most solid encoding - usally the transmit power and antenna sensitivity is also the strongest on the lowest rate so the SSID can be seen quite far away - often so far away that your clients wifi is able to receive the SSID beacons but unable to send something back that reaches the router. > What is it doing now, sending, waiting for a response, did it negotiate encryption yet? Wrong crypto results in no association - difficult to tell apart from low signal. > Is the low-level connection OK, and we have a problem with DHCP? This you can detect, but the OS obscures it from you. Yes. You can look at network-manager logs from Linux but sometimes it's difficult to tell - especially on Windows. > There is no easy way to see signal strength. There is also noise, antenna properties and everything depends on the rate and encoding used - it's not exactly easy. > Why does the connection suddenly drop out or get slow? Add also the rate control algorithms, the amount of clients, for certain 5GHz channels you have to obey radar then there is interference with bluetooth and microwaves. Also all that funky physics stuff with reflection and antenna positioning where moving a little bit might be just enough to cause problems for you.
lostboys67 9y ago
with my wireless CCNA hat on I am not sure describing an extender as a router exactly makes me that confident about the article. "Adding an additional router almost always makes things worse. " Not if you know what your doing :-) if it said adding an extender I would have agreed.
Mysterix 9y ago
>Replacing your router: > > Vendor A: 10% broken > Vendor B: 10% broken > P(both A and B broken): > 10% x 10% = 1% > >Replacing your router (or firmware) almost always fixes your problem. The conclusion is false : if router A is broken, router B still have 10% chance to be broken, the two events being independant. P(A broken | B broken) = 10% To get the 1% effect, advice could be : Always buy 2 routers instead of 1
- rullelito 9y ago
  This is a bit like the gameshow where you select from 3 doors, and then one door is removed and you have the option to change.
- Dylan16807 9y ago
  What exactly are you saying is wrong? If you have to replace the router, there's a 10% chance that new router is broken. But you only replace when the first router is broken, so it's 10% of 10%. Read it as "a strategy of replacing when needed" rather than "replacing in all cases for the hell of it".
  - Mysterix 9y ago
    The strategy "Buy 2 routers, and if the first one fails, then use the 2nd one" is ok, and gives you the 1% result. My (little) problem is the sentence "Replacing your router (or firmware) almost always fixes your problem.", because if the first router is broken, replacing it will only fix your problem in 10% of the cases, which is not "almost always".
    - Dylan16807 9y ago
      You don't actually have to buy a second router upfront, so that's not a good way to word it either. I'm struggling to find a great way to put it. Maybe "a one-replacement backup plan gives you a 99% chance of success"? Close but not very elegant. "Replacing your router (or firmware) fixes the problem except for 1% of all router buyers"?
- 9y ago
_pmf_ 9y ago
What's the best COTS WiFi module for as-generic-as-possible WiFi sniffing?
- nisa 9y ago
  Anything ath9k PCIe would be my guess. Driver is open-source, little to no closed firmware and it's battle tested and good Linux support. No 802.11ac through but for sniffing it shouldn't matter.
agumonkey 9y ago
Interesting, I just moved the ISP router back into the living room instead of my room, and used a tiny Range Extender. The bridging makes internet very different, latency is random, throughput will cap and then drop from time to time.. I suppose a network engineer would probably know how to make router and RE talk together better.
Yizahi 9y ago
Author forgot to add that clients also work only 90% of time (I'm looking at you, expensive Samsung and Apple phones). So in case of Router plus AP you get 0.90.90.9 = 72% reliability. Basically wifi is a mess.
rickpmg 9y ago
> Distributed systems are more reliable when you can get a service from one node OR another. I'm confused.. why did it take the author years to come up with this? Why is this a revelation?
chiph 9y ago
> 90% of customers I'm probably being pedantic here, but shouldn't this be 90% of devices? If I have three wifi devices at home, but then I go out and buy a fourth one -- and I find out it can't reliably connect. I've just fallen into the 10% zone. So I order a new router - I get it set up and now my new device works. Yayy! But now one of my older 3 devices has stopped connecting. I'm still in the 10% failure zone, even after spending a hundred bucks on a replacement for a router that was "mostly" working. So I keep both routers, assigning different SSIDs so the wireless devices will only find the routers they like. Have I now decreased my overall reliability because I'm now running in the "And" case with it's 90x90 multiplication, not the "Or" case? Most likely.
deleted 9y ago
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xxxdarrenxxx 9y ago
Edge cases are king in networking, at least now that humans are so "connected". Sometimes I'm playing a multiplayer online game and the connection lags for a second. My network then switches over, which takes up at least more "real time" than the actual lag (perhaps re-initialize sockets or arbitrary NAT operations or something). Here I want it to opt for the 1 sec dropout, because it will only take a second, instead of often needing to reload client on a network switch. The router's logic is "not wrong" though. Another problem is when 2 connections are close in signal strength. Ever other minute my network switches, coming across as pseudo-lag, because it's noticeable. Many "modern" webapps are designed to compensate for this (also for general offline usage). A "modern" web app does not actually need persistent stable connection to function. It either caches or just needs initial data (variables) and does all the calculating logic client-side. I like this, because it's more on similar grounds with how humans have/are working/communicating together in real life. This has more to do with conceptual architecture, and not tech though. Many off these things can be configured right as it stands, but routers default setting is: "stupid". This offcourse has it's reasons. Wifi also often gets confused if other wifi routers are nearby, or more relevant, if say 10 devices operate concurrently on the same local wifi. This is handicapped from the get go, because it has to filter the right packages out off the air. A wired connection is basically absolute about this. Like the article has stated, LTE seems more stable, because you have 100's off "routers" ur phone can choose from. Consumers don't want to buy 4 routers more for around the house to ensure optimal redundancy and stability. Best would be to not even hook nodes directly to a main consumer router, but a switch. If ur main acces-point fails on a software level ( or hardware for that matter), everything down the hierarchy is irrelevant, even though ur "landline" is working just fine. I also wish routers were less static from a consumers perspective. Ie. if i'm doing stuff on the net, I want my router to send me a msg saying, "hey for the past 20 minutes, you seem to have lag spikes, shall I switch to node x for you? prompt yes/no " There's not much done to make routers user friendly (isp has it's own personal-gain-y reasons for this). These things should be more integrated to the user. Again there are good reasons like security to not have a hard bound to your "main machine", just saying that it irks me.

170 points by colinprince 9y ago

1. Replacing your router (or firmware) almost always fixes your problem. 2. Adding an additional router almost always makes things worse. Solution: Switch off nodes when they stop working. My house has this problem. I live on the 4th floor, next to the main VDSL router. The kitchen & living room on the 2nd floor can't get a strong WiFi signal. After some thought about WiFi repeaters, I decided to buy a long Ethernet wire and run it down the stairs. I trip over it sometimes, but it's basically reliable. The downstairs router runs dd-wrt, and works fine 99% of the time (I've had to reboot it once in the past year). The upstairs VDSL router is owned by the telecom company (Chunghwa), and they don't give me administrator access. I can't change the firmware, and the box is frankly awful. About 6 months ago we complained repeatedly, asking them to replace the box. They sent tech guys, who tested the wire, and said that everything is fine. Indeed, it works about 70% of the time. But very often I come home from work, and I have to reboot that router before I can get online. My solution is to buy a Edimax WiFi power socket and a Raspberry Pi, which checks to see if it's online. When the network goes down for more than a minute, it'll automatically tell the WiFi power socket to turn the router off and on again. I know that power-cycling is bad for the router, but I don't see any other solution given the software constraints. I'm also surprised that there are no companies making devices for the purpose of power-cycling routers.

gav 9y ago
Megatec make a few devices for power cycling routers: http://www.megatec.com.tw/info.htm http://www.megatec.com.tw/info.htm I've not tried one and at around $75 they aren't cheap. I was looking into them at a time when my cable modem would forget how to route anything and need to be power cycled, but replacing it did the trick.
- gwern 9y ago
  I am both awed and dismayed that this is a thing.
- Johnny555 9y ago
  Here's another one: http://resetplug.com/ http://resetplug.com/ And here's one that resets based on a timer rather than Wifi signal: http://www.netreset.com/ http://www.netreset.com/ And another one that uses ethernet: https://www.amazon.com/3Gstore-Remote-Power-IP-Switch/dp/B01GOOE8OY/ https://www.amazon.com/3Gstore-Remote-Power-IP-Switch/dp/B01...
  - peterburkimsher 9y ago
    Thank you so much for finding existing products! I'm certainly going to buy one of these. ResetPlug is for WiFi, but hasn't posted anything since 2016 (I'm a bit worried that it might not exist any more). Megatec ezPower is in Taiwan (local for me), but is only Ethernet. Often the Ethernet still works even when the WiFi doesn't, so I'll try to get the ResetPlug first.
- kalleboo 9y ago
  My parents just used one of those old school mechanical socket timers and had it shut down for 5 minutes every morning at 4 AM. Might not work for you if you have long-running connections you need to maintain...
m-j-fox 9y ago
You, sir, are a badass. You should sell wifi power cycling sockets. I will be your first customer.
Johnny555 9y ago
2. Adding an additional router almost always makes things worse. While I wouldn't add another router, I've found that adding additional AP's almost always makes things better, assuming they are not on overlapping channels.
- cbhl 9y ago
  I've seen Google Wi-Fi installations where someone adds three APs in a tiny urban apartment, and removing one actually improves signal and throughput.
  - lstamour 9y ago
    I've had that happen, the trick is to place them on the other side of large metal objects (like in rooms behind fridges) or with as many walls between them as possible. It really does come down to placement and how many Wi-Fi hotspots your neighbours run. It's theoretically possible that your 3 Wi-Fi hotspots could run at channels 1, 6 and 11, and try to pin devices to each channel, while still working in one room. But if you've limited Wi-Fi spectrum available, adding more APs isn't going to help things unless they're carefully tuned to transmit with less power/interference.
- Yizahi 9y ago
  Except when for some reason roaming don't work for that certain device during full moon. Or after power outage it will boot but not properly and router will work and AP won't. Or AP kinda works, WiFi part at least but there is no internet there for whatever reason. In my case it is a clear case of multiplying problems.
  - Johnny555 9y ago
    If you have a strong enough signal that adding a new AP is not neccessary, then you don't need to roam. If you have multiple AP's and can't roam between them, you're no worse off than if you had one. If you have malfunctioning hardware, then you're going to have problems whether you have one AP or multiple AP's -- use better hardware.
danieldk 9y ago
I decided to buy a long Ethernet wire and run it down the stairs. I trip over it sometimes, Why not use Powerline Ethernet? In most houses, it's typically fast and reliable and requires no extra wires. E.g. the data rate between my desk and router is currently 784 Mbit/s.
- peterburkimsher 9y ago
  Price. $1500 (50 USD) for power-line Ethernet, $300 (10 USD) for a wire. And the lower latent power consumption, and the fact the wire is less likely to be the cause of any problem. I'm renting the house, and wherever I move next probably won't have this problem.
- therealidiot 9y ago
  These are good but if you have any analog audio/video kit nearby (or if you listen to shortwave radio) you'll hear them. Also, avoid TP-Link adapters as they seem to have some issue coming out of powersave mode that means I have to ping something all day to prevent them from sleeping
- ht85 9y ago
  Powerline is a crapshoot, at least as much as Wifi. I installed several different models a few years back, for me and some friends/family, and in every case ended up finding another solution as they would just add another layer of unreliability. Cheap ones suffer from the same problems as cheap routers, randomly hanging and requiring a physical plug / unplug when the room gets hot, or whatever other interferences degrade their performance over time. Expensive ones are still not 100% reliable, and most of the time will cost more than a well done ethernet installation.
  - danieldk 9y ago
    Never had any problems in three different houses. Two different brands (we use AVM Fritz!PowerLine now). I reliably get high bandwidth and low latency. A gave an old set of adapters to my parents in law who live in an older house (from the 1930s) and it works well for them as well. Of course, as a sibling said, it'll depend a lot on the wiring and/or other connected devices. So I guess it's best to try with a borrowed pair of adapters first.
Ded7xSEoPKYNsDd 9y ago
How warm is it at your place? I've been quite successful avoiding router lock ups by adding some active cooling: take an old PC fan, solder it to the power wires of an old USB cable, connect that cable to the router (assuming your router has an active USB port).
- peterburkimsher 9y ago
  Taiwan: so hot right now. 32ºC in the day, 26ºC at night. I've often speculated that the temperature is causing problems, which would also explain why it's hard to reproduce the issue when a telecom service tech comes over. I'll have a look around for a suitable fan, and see if that helps.
- crystalclaw 9y ago
  I did this on one of my APs that fails frequently (locks up and the front lights go off, signal strength randomly goes down to about 8 feet with no obstructions, etc) and it helped immensely. unfortunately, it didn't /solve/ the problem for me, just made it better. I've ordered some unifi stuff on recommendation from friends. hopefully that'll live up to the hype and do the job.
keithpeter 9y ago
"After some thought about WiFi repeaters, I decided to buy a long Ethernet wire and run it down the stairs." Would some of those 'homeplug' plugs that use the mains wiring as a closed circuit low frequency radio signal link be tidier? I used a fairly low speed pair to get Internet from modem/router downstairs to desktop PC upstairs without drilling holes and running cable. Worked ok. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HomePlug https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HomePlug
- LogicX 9y ago
  No, I bouht some recently to experiment: Always about 10% packet loss (yes, i was on the same circuit, packet loss was much worse across circuits)
  - keithpeter 9y ago
    fair enough. Cable ties on the side of the stairs then - don't want any accidents.
    - corobo 9y ago
      or even use those cable clip things and run the wire along the ceiling/floor, paint the lot the same colour as the wall
hyperdunc 9y ago
Why is power cycling bad for the router?
- ysleepy 9y ago
  It isn't. The OS is only mounting the flash writable on configuration changes. Hard rebooting it is expected and designed for.
Yizahi 9y ago
This is how it always ends - wired ethernet where you can and rebooting malfunctioning wireless devices (or all of them if unsure). Why can't we have nice things?.. Good idea about automation, I try it at home.

untangle 9y ago

I don't know who this analysis is aimed at but I would advise caution in trying to apply it. My main criticisms of the article are that it: (1) ignores modern wi-fi mesh technology; (2) oversimplifies "solutions" to the point of false equivalencies; (3) ignores performance and convenience concerns; (4) uses vague language ("it works"); and (5) treats "wi-fi" as a black box that operates in a vacuum and is not amenable to tuning (channels, power levels, freq's, etc.). Ironically, the author's "buddy wi-fi" proposal embodies a subset of the capabilities of a current consumer mesh setup such as the Amplifi product that I use in my 3-story home.

brians 9y ago
What's true about modern meshes that obviates the conditional probability of success? This'll be news to me!
- exelius 9y ago
  Modern meshes still often have a choke point. Kill enough nodes at the right point in the mesh and the reliability degrades quickly as the backhaul links get oversubscribed. At least that's what I think OP meant :)
  - lstamour 9y ago
    Intriguingly, I think my Google OnHub devices use spanning tree to find Internet across the mesh. I actually wired up both rather than use mesh networks on their own, though, and a bug in my Cisco wired switch's use of spanning tree was what caused problems -- despite having the cables connected, and ethernet running just fine between them, the spanning tree figured transmitting over wireless from one OnHub to the other would be faster than the ethernet switch between them. (The fix was to disable broken, manual spanning tree settings on the Cisco switch.) This indicates to me that if you had a dozen Google Wi-Fi devices and a few of them had ethernet connections, the rest would quickly find the shortest path from your device to the AP you're connected to the nearest mesh device with the fastest ethernet to the outside world. I'm not sure how the hops are weighted though, presumably reliability and signal strength plays a role.

jv22222 9y ago

After 20 years of buyin (15+ routers) and searching for a wifi router that "just works"TM in large house scenario I finally found the ASUS AC5300. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0167HG1V6/ https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0167HG1V6/ It has 3 radios on board 2x5ghz and 1x2.4ghz. It has a mode that allows you to use a single ssid across all 3 radios. It uses QOS to dynamically switch each devices to the best radio for at any moment. I purchased the same device for a small retail business and it works amazingly well in that setting too. Highly recommended.

Foxhuls 9y ago
I've really been enjoying my Ubiquiti setup that I switched to about 5 months ago. The internet has still gone down but that is due to my ISP and not the hardware.
- adamst85 9y ago
  +1 for Ubiquiti Unifi. Got 2 AP's and a Router and it has been great with no issues so far (3 months). Upgraded as my previous combo router (with OpenWRT Gargoyle) would silently stop allowing wireless devices from connecting to the 2.4ghz at seemingly random intervals.
- exelius 9y ago
  Ubiquiti can get expensive for a home user, but yeah. It's rock solid gear, truthfully advertised and still a bargain at that price point.
  - eltoozero 9y ago
    Not expensive, a single UAP-AC-PRO is maybe $125, add a mikrotik hEx RB750GL and you're golden. The 802.11N Unifi gear is <$200 for a three-pack and works of MikroTik passive PoE like the RB260, 5-port gigabit PoE with an SFP cage. MikroTik and Unifi is an unbeatable performance/price combo for individuals, large homes and business scaling up to medium sized and multi-site deployments. With those prices and features you can affordably dog-food the setup and support your friends and family.

StillBored 9y ago

Personally I think a big problem are all these 3 in 1 type modem/router/wifi solutions and the inability to debug which part is causing problems. These devices a less expensive but seem to always compromise some functionality. What that is, is rarely evident from the box/review/manual. For a long time now, I've always recommend to people to buy standalone cable/DSL modems and figure out how to get the analog signal strength/error correction/retry counters from them (and return it if you can't get them). Then spend the time replacing connectors in your house and getting the modem as close to the curb as possible. Then pick a good wifi solution, and tweak that until its as clean as possible. Wifi and modem standards evolve at different paces, and its silly to upgrade your modem or router every time you want a newer wifi standard, or for that matter change your wifi to get a newer cable or DSL modem.

legulere 9y ago
Or just buy something of quality like AVM Fritz!Box, which has quite good diagnose utilities on board
- voltagex_ 9y ago
  It depends. The Fritzboxes that were sold in Australia had an ADSL chipset in them that wasn't very good at handling noisy lines (you're very, very lucky if yours isn't). Your best bet is/was to buy a device with a particular Broadcom chipset in it that was good at handling noise. The difference it made to my connection speed was from syncing at 4 megabit downstream to syncing at 10 megabit downstream. This steadily degraded to 8 megabit over the next few years, but what are you gonna do?

capitalsigma 9y ago

Only tangentially related -- I swear, nothing makes me feel more technically incompetent than debugging WiFi issues. I do moderately low level systems programming all day long, but I can't get the damn internet to reach from my living room to my desktop computer?

Qub3d 9y ago
I mean, the fact that WiFi works at all is amazing. We're encoding information--lots of it, too--and sending it through light forms of energy ripples through the air, which we can then decode. All of this happens at a sub-millisecond rate. Technology is amazing, and we can sometimes forget that [0]. I wouldn't treat yourself harshly because you don't fully understand it. [0]:https://youtu.be/zbCoe3vIskA?t=40s https://youtu.be/zbCoe3vIskA?t=40s
- scrollaway 9y ago
  That was a really wholesome comment :) As someone who feels a lot like the GP, thank you and you're absolutely right.

LobsterY 9y ago

This is a great illustration of why the naive belief that a microservice architecture will solve all the things is so ill-conceived. When developers fail to properly assess how deeply coupled microservices are to their dependencies, the result is cascading failure scenarios that take down the whole ecosystem. Perhaps we should aim for 'services' architecture that are just right. When two concerns are deeply coupled/dependent on one another, the ecosystem will likely be more robust if these are left together in a single service. In addition, this adheres to good old fashioned software design principles of striving for good coupling/cohesion relationships.

bsder 9y ago
> <insert buzzword> will solve all the things This is the failure irrespective of what <insert buzzword> is. However, in my opinion, microservices are about decoupling rather than reliability. In addition, proper use of microservices means that people producing for and consuming from a microservice now MUST plan for how to detect when it is down and what to do when that microservice is offline.

deleted 9y ago

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amiga-workbench 9y ago

I run a Microtik Routerboard and a few Ubiquiti Unifi AP's. Never had a peep out of it with over a years uptime now. The problem seems to be shitty consumer grade hardware (isn't it always), I'd advise upgrading to entry-level business grade gear, it's much more reliable.

jdblair 9y ago
+1 for the MikroTik routerboard. My 2011UiAS-2HnD has been running great for 2 years. Caveat: the configuration UI complex! It's easy to set up a basic configuration. More complex features (vpn, port forwarding, custom firewall) are arcane, in the same way configuring a Cisco router is arcane. But those complex features are available!
- amiga-workbench 9y ago
  Yep, the quick setup will handle a standard residential configuration for you, but if you want failover or load balancing things get more complicated.
AnAfrican 9y ago
Mikrotik is also as cheap as it gets.
- amiga-workbench 9y ago
  Yeah, but cheap in the same way as a refurbished ThinkPad, not cheap as in poorly quality.
pixl97 9y ago
>The problem seems to be shitty consumer grade hardware Partially.... Yes, consumer grade hardware sucks, but so do consumers. When you see a wifi router in a corner, partially covered in junk (or blocked by household stuff), and it's power brick is sandwiched between 5 devices and is running about 150 degrees, it's not really the hardwares fault. People that tend to install pro-sumer/commercial equipment tend to plug things into UPS's with proper ventilation and center of the room mount their AP, leading to a far reduced number of incidents.

captainmuon 9y ago

This is a good insight, especially the diagram at the top. But the quesion for me is, why is a router broken say 10% of the time? I think the problem is that WiFi is totally undebuggable. When it doesn't work, you don't see at which stage it doesn't work. - Do the frames in the air get corrupted or dropped? What portion of frames makes it through? - I see the SSID, so it can transmit something. Why can't I connect and get at least a slow connection? - What is it doing now, sending, waiting for a response, did it negotiate encryption yet? - Is the low-level connection OK, and we have a problem with DHCP? This you can detect, but the OS obscures it from you. - There is no easy way to see signal strength. You get a more or less meaningful number reported from the card, but these nice diagrams showing signal strength over frequency? Mostly fake, this is just the reported signal strength of each channel, smoothed out to look like a continuous scan. If we had a continuous scan, we could see individual sources of interference better. - Why does the connection suddenly drop out or get slow? Is the problem on my side of the router, or on the internet side? Are buffers full/empty? Is some object standing in the way, or is is a weather phenomenon? You can ping your router or modem, and some routers have nice tools to let you see graphs of upstream and downstream. But there is no coherent debugging solution.

nisa 9y ago
> why is a router broken say 10% of the time? My guess would be that WiFi drivers are kind of quirky - if you follow OpenWRT/LEDE development there a lot of issues that appear only on heavy load or under certain situations - causes range from driver bugs / chip bugs / firmware bugs - most of the stuff is NDA or closed source. You've got the problem on both sides - especially the situation on Linux is still dire for lot's of chipsets. Even my years old intel card in my notebook does not really work well with Linux und the current kernel/firmware. I blame the vendors. > Do the frames in the air get corrupted or dropped? What portion of frames makes it through? That also depends on the rate and encoding that the frames are sent. Then there is stuff like frame aggretation that sometimes work sometimes not. > I see the SSID, so it can transmit something. Why can't I connect and get at least a slow connection? SSID is send with the lowest rate (1Mbit) and with the most solid encoding - usally the transmit power and antenna sensitivity is also the strongest on the lowest rate so the SSID can be seen quite far away - often so far away that your clients wifi is able to receive the SSID beacons but unable to send something back that reaches the router. > What is it doing now, sending, waiting for a response, did it negotiate encryption yet? Wrong crypto results in no association - difficult to tell apart from low signal. > Is the low-level connection OK, and we have a problem with DHCP? This you can detect, but the OS obscures it from you. Yes. You can look at network-manager logs from Linux but sometimes it's difficult to tell - especially on Windows. > There is no easy way to see signal strength. There is also noise, antenna properties and everything depends on the rate and encoding used - it's not exactly easy. > Why does the connection suddenly drop out or get slow? Add also the rate control algorithms, the amount of clients, for certain 5GHz channels you have to obey radar then there is interference with bluetooth and microwaves. Also all that funky physics stuff with reflection and antenna positioning where moving a little bit might be just enough to cause problems for you.

lostboys67 9y ago

with my wireless CCNA hat on I am not sure describing an extender as a router exactly makes me that confident about the article. "Adding an additional router almost always makes things worse. " Not if you know what your doing :-) if it said adding an extender I would have agreed.

Mysterix 9y ago

>Replacing your router: > > Vendor A: 10% broken > Vendor B: 10% broken > P(both A and B broken): > 10% x 10% = 1% > >Replacing your router (or firmware) almost always fixes your problem. The conclusion is false : if router A is broken, router B still have 10% chance to be broken, the two events being independant. P(A broken | B broken) = 10% To get the 1% effect, advice could be : Always buy 2 routers instead of 1

rullelito 9y ago
This is a bit like the gameshow where you select from 3 doors, and then one door is removed and you have the option to change.
Dylan16807 9y ago
What exactly are you saying is wrong? If you have to replace the router, there's a 10% chance that new router is broken. But you only replace when the first router is broken, so it's 10% of 10%. Read it as "a strategy of replacing when needed" rather than "replacing in all cases for the hell of it".
- Mysterix 9y ago
  The strategy "Buy 2 routers, and if the first one fails, then use the 2nd one" is ok, and gives you the 1% result. My (little) problem is the sentence "Replacing your router (or firmware) almost always fixes your problem.", because if the first router is broken, replacing it will only fix your problem in 10% of the cases, which is not "almost always".
  - Dylan16807 9y ago
    You don't actually have to buy a second router upfront, so that's not a good way to word it either. I'm struggling to find a great way to put it. Maybe "a one-replacement backup plan gives you a 99% chance of success"? Close but not very elegant. "Replacing your router (or firmware) fixes the problem except for 1% of all router buyers"?
9y ago

_pmf_ 9y ago

What's the best COTS WiFi module for as-generic-as-possible WiFi sniffing?

nisa 9y ago
Anything ath9k PCIe would be my guess. Driver is open-source, little to no closed firmware and it's battle tested and good Linux support. No 802.11ac through but for sniffing it shouldn't matter.

agumonkey 9y ago

Interesting, I just moved the ISP router back into the living room instead of my room, and used a tiny Range Extender. The bridging makes internet very different, latency is random, throughput will cap and then drop from time to time.. I suppose a network engineer would probably know how to make router and RE talk together better.

Yizahi 9y ago

Author forgot to add that clients also work only 90% of time (I'm looking at you, expensive Samsung and Apple phones). So in case of Router plus AP you get 0.90.90.9 = 72% reliability. Basically wifi is a mess.

rickpmg 9y ago

> Distributed systems are more reliable when you can get a service from one node OR another. I'm confused.. why did it take the author years to come up with this? Why is this a revelation?

chiph 9y ago

> 90% of customers I'm probably being pedantic here, but shouldn't this be 90% of devices? If I have three wifi devices at home, but then I go out and buy a fourth one -- and I find out it can't reliably connect. I've just fallen into the 10% zone. So I order a new router - I get it set up and now my new device works. Yayy! But now one of my older 3 devices has stopped connecting. I'm still in the 10% failure zone, even after spending a hundred bucks on a replacement for a router that was "mostly" working. So I keep both routers, assigning different SSIDs so the wireless devices will only find the routers they like. Have I now decreased my overall reliability because I'm now running in the "And" case with it's 90x90 multiplication, not the "Or" case? Most likely.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

xxxdarrenxxx 9y ago

Edge cases are king in networking, at least now that humans are so "connected". Sometimes I'm playing a multiplayer online game and the connection lags for a second. My network then switches over, which takes up at least more "real time" than the actual lag (perhaps re-initialize sockets or arbitrary NAT operations or something). Here I want it to opt for the 1 sec dropout, because it will only take a second, instead of often needing to reload client on a network switch. The router's logic is "not wrong" though. Another problem is when 2 connections are close in signal strength. Ever other minute my network switches, coming across as pseudo-lag, because it's noticeable. Many "modern" webapps are designed to compensate for this (also for general offline usage). A "modern" web app does not actually need persistent stable connection to function. It either caches or just needs initial data (variables) and does all the calculating logic client-side. I like this, because it's more on similar grounds with how humans have/are working/communicating together in real life. This has more to do with conceptual architecture, and not tech though. Many off these things can be configured right as it stands, but routers default setting is: "stupid". This offcourse has it's reasons. Wifi also often gets confused if other wifi routers are nearby, or more relevant, if say 10 devices operate concurrently on the same local wifi. This is handicapped from the get go, because it has to filter the right packages out off the air. A wired connection is basically absolute about this. Like the article has stated, LTE seems more stable, because you have 100's off "routers" ur phone can choose from. Consumers don't want to buy 4 routers more for around the house to ensure optimal redundancy and stability. Best would be to not even hook nodes directly to a main consumer router, but a switch. If ur main acces-point fails on a software level ( or hardware for that matter), everything down the hierarchy is irrelevant, even though ur "landline" is working just fine. I also wish routers were less static from a consumers perspective. Ie. if i'm doing stuff on the net, I want my router to send me a msg saying, "hey for the past 20 minutes, you seem to have lag spikes, shall I switch to node x for you? prompt yes/no " There's not much done to make routers user friendly (isp has it's own personal-gain-y reasons for this). These things should be more integrated to the user. Again there are good reasons like security to not have a hard bound to your "main machine", just saying that it irks me.