4 ms·

We have some bad channel congestion (UK, terraced house, relatively narrow street) but part of the problem appears to be ISPs lock the channels, there are compl

We have some bad channel congestion (UK, terraced house, relatively narrow street) but part of the problem appears to be ISPs lock the channels, there are completely free channels but the settings on the router don't allow one to select a channel, it auto-picks. Weird. The algo appears to be "choose channel 1 even if it's totally congested"; for most of the neighbours too (4 or 5 different ISPs). I can only assume that they sell "super-duper routers with greater bandwidth" where they make the box look like a spaceship and actually enable a useful channel selection algorithm? Is there an actually good reason for the channel selection being awful?

crazygringo 2y ago
Is there any reason you can't just plug your own WiFi router into its Ethernet port so you have control over your WiFi?
jeroenhd 2y ago
> Is there an actually good reason for the channel selection being awful? The only one I can think of, based on my experience back in the day, is to prevent people from picking 2.4GHz channels that aren't 1/6/11. Modern routers often come with visualisations to show why this is a bad idea, but I've seen plenty of cases where people went "wow, these 1/6/11 channels are super crowded, I'll just use channel 3 because nobody else is using that" and making the situation much worse by now overlapping and interfering with two common channels instead of just one. Part of the spec also mandates that for wide 802.11n channels, you can't just force yourself into using a wide spectrum when there's not much spectrum to go around. On the 5.2+GHz band there are also legal restrictions (such as DFS, to not interfere with radars, and sometimes transmission power limits on specific subsections of the band). Some larger corporate WiFi installations will automatically adjust channels across many access points to optimise coverage and minimise interference. Perhaps ISP APs will do something similar, as ISPs have a somewhat accurate map of what frequencies are used in a geographical area. That seems rather overbearing to me, though. I still can't think of a reason to not let users pick one of the "good" bands themselves. Some kind of automatic frequency selection is a solid default, but I don't see why users shouldn't get the freedom to override that default.

crazygringo 2y ago

Is there any reason you can't just plug your own WiFi router into its Ethernet port so you have control over your WiFi?

jeroenhd 2y ago

> Is there an actually good reason for the channel selection being awful? The only one I can think of, based on my experience back in the day, is to prevent people from picking 2.4GHz channels that aren't 1/6/11. Modern routers often come with visualisations to show why this is a bad idea, but I've seen plenty of cases where people went "wow, these 1/6/11 channels are super crowded, I'll just use channel 3 because nobody else is using that" and making the situation much worse by now overlapping and interfering with two common channels instead of just one. Part of the spec also mandates that for wide 802.11n channels, you can't just force yourself into using a wide spectrum when there's not much spectrum to go around. On the 5.2+GHz band there are also legal restrictions (such as DFS, to not interfere with radars, and sometimes transmission power limits on specific subsections of the band). Some larger corporate WiFi installations will automatically adjust channels across many access points to optimise coverage and minimise interference. Perhaps ISP APs will do something similar, as ISPs have a somewhat accurate map of what frequencies are used in a geographical area. That seems rather overbearing to me, though. I still can't think of a reason to not let users pick one of the "good" bands themselves. Some kind of automatic frequency selection is a solid default, but I don't see why users shouldn't get the freedom to override that default.