3 ms·
My most unusual wifi issue was on a system that said it had a great connection (SNR) and was running at high speed, but would just not pass traffic if it was fu
by zdw 4y ago
My most unusual wifi issue was on a system that said it had a great connection (SNR) and was running at high speed, but would just not pass traffic if it was further than about 1m from a base station.
Turned out to have multiple antennas, and the transmit antenna was broken, so it could receive just fine, but not transmit over anything but short distances.
Sometimes the physical layer is the problem, even if the logical layer says everything is fine.
- klysm 4y agoI guess the logic layer only said the receive side was fine. It can’t see what’s happening within the transmit antenna I don’t think
- Nextgrid 4y agoI'm surprised there isn't a mechanism for the link peer to report the SNR to the sender from its perspective. I've had the same issue without any antenna troubles - Mac would constantly connect to the 5GHz network and struggle to send any packets out, yet the displayed signal strength was good. It turns out it was able to "hear" the AP just fine, but the AP had trouble hearing back, yet somehow there's no feedback mechanism for it to know.
- klysm 4y agoA kind of SNR ping seems like it would make a lot of sense. I don’t know enough about radios but anybody know why that doesn’t exist?
- sbierwagen 4y agoWifi 6 has all sorts of active sensing stuff for spatial frequency reuse, but GP didn't say what generation of wifi equipment was being used.
- ac29 4y agoThe industrial (non-wifi) radios I use at work have a signal/noise ping function. Its very useful.