Question Can "festive lights" affect wi-fi signal?

[cheddar-man]

I live in a small 2 bed bungalow, all internal walls being of the wood/plaster board construction. The router is in the lounge (back of the bungalow) nearest to the main incoming phone line socket. From this location to the front of the house is only about 30ft (10 mtrs) and both rooms at the front, and the adjacent garage had good signals.

Some weeks ago I installed a couple of wi-fi security cameras, one outside the front bedroom and one over the garage, both receiving good wi-fi signal and both working just fine until a few days ago when they both dropped off the wi-fi.

I've had the BT engineer out and she assures me that everything is working just fine, she even tried a new router but with the same result, very poor or no signal at the front or the cameras so they are off line and won't connect.

The only thing we have done at that time is to put up our Christmas decorations and some LED light strings and on the Christmas tree in the lounge.

Is it possible that these light strings/wires are attenuation the wi-fi signal?

I have bought one of these. Will it help?

 

[bill001g]

It is pretty easy to test just turn them off and see if the problem goes away.

Very technically it is illegal for the lights to transmit radio signals above certain limits on all kinds of frequencies. You never know what was imported from china that does not meet FCC rules.

There is no magic device that will fix this. A repeater takes very careful placement where it gets strong signal from the router but can still provide siganal to the remote unit. You are going to pay a massive bandwidth penalty because you are at a minimum you are using twice the bandwidth.

Other than say a solar powered camera you always have to have a wire run to the house for power. Many times it is just as easy to use power over ethernet rather than deal with getting power outside where it is wet.
I mean if you have a outdoor power outlet that is protected from weather you could use a powerline network device. Then you could connect your camera via ethernet or you could buy a powerline device that has a wifi AP in it. Your wifi radio would then be very close to the camera and it would use the electrical wires to bring the signal back.

 

[cheddar-man]

Thank you for the reply.

Whether light are on or not makes no difference. My thinking was that possibly, all those long and short extra lengths of wire hanging around house could have som effect on the 2 & 5Gh signals, attenuate them somehow. The BT engineer did mention that she had found this to be the case once.

Any how, I'll see what happens if I put the booster in the front bedroom, can always return it if it make no difference😊 Apart from that, see how things are when we remove all the lights.

No unfortunately there is no outside power point near the camera placings.

 

[sizzling]

When you tested the light off did you switch off at the wall or use a switch inline with lights? Try with them switched off at the wall.

 

[cheddar-man]

Thanks, we always switch off at wall outlet. I have temporarily set the camera up on the windowsill of the front bedroom and it works a treat.

I have the latest BT Hub, Is this bi directional or does it transmit the Wi-Fy in a certain. direction??

I have the "My BT" app on my phone and it has a Wi-Fi strength meter and it does seem to vary a bit depending on the orientation of the hub.

Cheers

 

[bill001g]

That question is very complex actually.

In general almost all antenna on routers are omni directional so they send the data in circular pattern. This assumes the antenna are external. If they are internal part some directions maybe partially blocked by the case and/or the internal part of the router.
Making this even more complex is a lot of routers support what is called beam forming. You generally will never see it testing with a wifi strength meter because those only see the becon messages not the actual traffic. When the router has a actual session with the end device it has the ability to adjust the signal levels between its antenna to change the signal overlap which causes the signal to be stronger in certain directions. This is a topic that will make you head hurt if you get into the details.

To some extent beamforming will increase the transfer rates for device that support it. In general it is not a huge difference but you can measure the difference if you turn the feature on and off.

The other issue is you actually have 2 signals one sent by the router and the other send by the end device. These many times have different antenna coverage patterns. The other issue is most routers transmit at full legal power where some end device do not. Mostly it is small battery powered devices transmitting at lower power but you would have to read the specs or take the FCCID for the device and look up the test results.