Question Advanced Wireless Settings in my old router's web interface ?

[Boris_yo]

Hello.

I have an old Edimax BR-6428nS wireless router that does its job for my humble purpose. I always wondered about advanced wireless settings in its web interface that I never touched.

Recently wireless throughput and ping times changed not for the better so I changed the channel on 2.5GHz band and it improved. But I am still curious about these advanced settings and whether they can be optimized.

Data rate has the following options: 1M, 2M, 5.5M, 11M, 6M, 9M, 12M, 18M, 24M, 36M, 48M, 54M

N data rate has options ranging from MCS0 up to MCS15

I remember setting channel width from 40MHz to 20MHz on a different router and found that 40MHz get me higher throughput in single connection but low throughput in multiple connections in Speedtest. Also the reach of wireless suffered despite showing full signal strength so I had to change tablet's direction a few degrees. I decided to return to 20MHz frequency because overall single and multiple connections have balanced and wireless signal quality was stable and my tablet could remain in same position.

 

[bill001g]

The very first thing I see on your router is that is talks about being "green" and using less power. It also outputs well under 1/10 the radio power of almost every other router and will get much poorer coverage....but it is so nice to be "green".

You likely want to leave everything on auto. It should negotiate the best combination with your end device.
The only thing you can change is the channel number but that is not what most people think it is. Most routers show around 11 channels BUT these channels are only 5mhz wide. The router uses 20mhz or 40mhz channels and there is only 60mhz total.
This means you can't fit 2 40mhz signals without overlapping. This is why you see the old 1,6,11 channel recommendation. That is for 20mhz blocks but almost everyone uses 40mhz. So you have the lower half or the upper half and the middle overlaps your neighbors no matter what you do.
Sometimes using 20mhz is better because you get lucky and not overlap as many neighbors.

You generally do not want to force anything related to the data encoding. The device should do the best.

This table is the one I keep linked to figure out all the data encoding rates. This one has all the new wifi6 stuff on it. You want to only look at the orange part that is the older 802.11n. This mostly is for understanding what is going on you are fairly limited in what you can set.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet...nKQ1O7abij/pubhtml?gid=1367372895&single=true

 

[Boris_yo]

The very first thing I see on your router is that is talks about being "green" and using less power. It also outputs well under 1/10 the radio power of almost every other router and will get much poorer coverage....but it is so nice to be "green".

Why 1/10 of every other router? Product page states the router outputs 66% less power than other routers. Is this not 3.4/10 of other routers?

20MHz channel width is best used on 1, 6, 11 channels due to gaps they have between each other? I tested this and the farther was the channel, the better throughout I received. Wonder why channel 11 is the best in my environment.

There's still place for 40MHz on 1-11 channel spectrum. I read that channel 3 and 11 are best for it.

 

[dwd999]

Why 1/10 of every other router? Product page states the router outputs 66% less power than other routers. Is this not 3.4/10 of other routers?

20MHz channel width is best used on 1, 6, 11 channels due to gaps they have between each other? I tested this and the farther was the channel, the better throughout I received. Wonder why channel 11 is the best in my environment.

There's still place for 40MHz on 1-11 channel spectrum. I read that channel 3 and 11 are best for it.

There's the free Wifi analyzer in the Microsoft Store that will give you a visual presentation of channel usage in your neighborhood, especially the number of neighbors on each channel. You can see your own signal strength compared to competing signals and which channels to avoid because of heavy usage.

 

[bill001g]

It is actually much less than than 1/10 but I was too lazy to compute the actual value.

This is strangeness about how radio power and "dBm" is done. The maximum power allowed is 30db. In this case you router states that it can be 16-18db which is nice that I did not have to search for it.

The thing is every change of 3db doubles the power. A 10db difference is a 10 times difference. I just pretended your device was using 20db because I knew 30db had 10 times the power of 20db.

So if you go to one of the sites that convert DB to watts. You will see that 30db is 1 watt of power...ie 1000milliwatts. 18db of power is only 63milliwatts...where 20db is 100milliwatts.

The problem with wifi channels recommendation is they pretend that you are the only person using wifi. If you use 40mhz and you choose channel 3 you are actually using more or less channels 1-8 since they are only 5mhz wide. If you choose the top range which the center is on about channel 9 you are actually using channels 4-11. This means both signals are using channels 4-8. Key here is the router is showing channel numbers in 5mhz blocks where the wifi standard is using 20 or 40mhz. Not sure why they did this. On 5ghz everything is 20mhz blocks.

 

[Boris_yo]

There's the free Wifi analyzer in the Microsoft Store that will give you a visual presentation of channel usage in your neighborhood, especially the number of neighbors on each channel. You can see your own signal strength compared to competing signals and which channels to avoid because of heavy usage.

My desktop computer with Windows 10 does not have wireless adapter. I can use smartphone app to do that?

 

[dwd999]

My desktop computer with Windows 10 does not have wireless adapter. I can use smartphone app to do that?

Yes but you may have to try more than one to get the information that you need on a small screen.

 

[Boris_yo]

Yes but you may have to try more than one to get the information that you need on a small screen.

Do I need to analyze in the room I want wireless signal improved or next to wireless router?

 

[dwd999]

Do I need to analyze in the room I want wireless signal improved or next to wireless router?

It would be best in the room where you want the wireless improved since you want to see if there are any strong signals from neighbors interfering with your reception.