[SOLVED] can other users 2.4ghz heavy traffic effect my 5ghz bandwidth

[Oporhatch]

Recently my 5ghz network speeds have dropped dramatically 150mbps to 80mbps at certain times....my thought is that I can see a new connection near me, but it only uses 2.4ghz.

Can excessive traffic from a 2.4ghz router (external) effect my 2.4Ghz (we are on the same channel) and have a knock on effect to my 5Ghz....or is it more likely that
the excessive traffic from this external source is having the greater impact ...

I am not quite sure how these can all impact each other ....I ran some wireless app, which could see no issue with the 5Ghz , but stated I should change the channel for the 2.4ghz....hence the question can the 2.4ghz effect the 5ghz

regards

 

[DeauteratedDog]

No - external traffic on 2.4 GHz can not effect your 5 GHz performance.
It can and will effect your 2.4 GHz performance, but the 5 GHz radio is independent.

 

[Oporhatch]

Thanks for your reply..........i was asking as my device is next to my router and I am losing at least 30mbps using wireless
and I can not understand why that has happened since about 6 weeks ago. I used to lose minimal bandwidth..10 mbps at most.

My router is an Archer C5 also I notice often my download speeds have dropped but not my upload speeds..does that suggest line contention ??

 

[bill001g]

You always want to test your internet with a ethernet so you can be sure the problem is wifi or soemthing else.

The 2.4g traffic can not directly affect 5g. That is part of the reason for all the government regulation. There is a lot of other types of usage for the radio frequencies between those 2 blocks and if it would interfere it can be far worse than just someone internet runs slow. Lot of critical things like police/fire radios and many satellites are in the range between those blocks.

You have to be very careful about looking apps that try to look at wifi usage. These devices have no way to actually see radio traffic. All they do is look for the broadcast messages a router send out. There is no way to know if this is a unused router or if 100 devices are attached. In addition it only shows the base channel. On 2.4g the channels numbers you see in a router are only 5mhz wide. The actual signal is either 20 or 40mhz wide so it uses 4 or 8 of these numbers. There is a similar issue on 5g but the channels you see in the router are 20mhz. The newest form of wifi can use 160mhz of bandwidth so it uses blocks of 8.

So you have to be very careful when you assume some radio channel is not being used if it is close to one that is being used. Pretty much you need to assume every channel is used because of how much bandwidth modern routers use.

In addition this only shows devices that send out a wifi broadcast. So if the router is configured to hide it SSID these tools will not show it. In addition there are many devices that operate on the same radio frequencies but are not Wifi. Since the scanner tool is using a Wifi chip it will not see say a baby monitor or security camera or a cordless phone.

In any case your best option is to try to change the radio channels on the 5g band and see if you get lucky. There might be interference your tools can not actually detect.

What may also be happening is your router is trying to be "freindly" and not overlap your neighbors. So instead of using 80mhz it is dropping back to 40 or 20. This in theory reduces errors but it also caps the bandwidth since the extra radio bandwidth is what allows it to put more data into the signal.

You might be able to see this by looking at the connection speeds you get to your router in the wifi status on your PC. Some routers you can force into only using the maximum radio bandwidth others you have no control.

 

[Oporhatch]

You always want to test your internet with a ethernet so you can be sure the problem is wifi or soemthing else.

The 2.4g traffic can not directly affect 5g. That is part of the reason for all the government regulation. There is a lot of other types of usage for the radio frequencies between those 2 blocks and if it would interfere it can be far worse than just someone internet runs slow. Lot of critical things like police/fire radios and many satellites are in the range between those blocks.

You have to be very careful about looking apps that try to look at wifi usage. These devices have no way to actually see radio traffic. All they do is look for the broadcast messages a router send out. There is no way to know if this is a unused router or if 100 devices are attached. In addition it only shows the base channel. On 2.4g the channels numbers you see in a router are only 5mhz wide. The actual signal is either 20 or 40mhz wide so it uses 4 or 8 of these numbers. There is a similar issue on 5g but the channels you see in the router are 20mhz. The newest form of wifi can use 160mhz of bandwidth so it uses blocks of 8.

So you have to be very careful when you assume some radio channel is not being used if it is close to one that is being used. Pretty much you need to assume every channel is used because of how much bandwidth modern routers use.

In addition this only shows devices that send out a wifi broadcast. So if the router is configured to hide it SSID these tools will not show it. In addition there are many devices that operate on the same radio frequencies but are not Wifi. Since the scanner tool is using a Wifi chip it will not see say a baby monitor or security camera or a cordless phone.

In any case your best option is to try to change the radio channels on the 5g band and see if you get lucky. There might be interference your tools can not actually detect.

What may also be happening is your router is trying to be "freindly" and not overlap your neighbors. So instead of using 80mhz it is dropping back to 40 or 20. This in theory reduces errors but it also caps the bandwidth since the extra radio bandwidth is what allows it to put more data into the signal.

You might be able to see this by looking at the connection speeds you get to your router in the wifi status on your PC. Some routers you can force into only using the maximum radio bandwidth others you have no control.

Reply
Thanks for the info that is great for me .........I have been checking the mbps with Ethernet and Wifi. To be quite honest the ethernet has been fine, but the Wifi seems to have dropped considerably from where I was getting 158mbps regularly no wifi gives me around 120mbps....I do notice my ethernet has dropped to 149mbps and I was only paying for 150. I looked at the connection speed on the wifi status it was 443 mbps
thanks again/ Maybe I am just being greedy !!!! but I am looking to get 150mbps, with VPN on (best location) and was therefore looking to up to 200mbps, but if I am losing 30mbps for 150, then looking at that I will lose 40mbps, which leaves 160mbps and then the VPN reduction.So maybe I need to look at 300 !!

 

[bill001g]

I will assume the number is actually 433 on the wifi status. This represent the way the data is encoded more than the speed. What you can tell from this number is you using 80mhz channel width on 5G and you are getting very good signal levels. It is only using 1 antenna/feed. It is possible to overlap up to 4 but both the router and the end device must have 4 antenna. Now going from 1 to 2 antenna does give more but it is nowhere close to double. Going from say 2-3 is even less gain. It is actually transmitting overlapping signals and hoping it can sort the data out at the far end. Does not work as well in real life as it does on paper.

This site should set you expectations a little better. When you see the rates at a average distance from the router are under 300 and this is using the fancy 4x4 antenna devices on both ends. The nic cards for pc that have 4 antenna are very very rare so even these numbers tend to be higher than you will ever get.

https://www.smallnetbuilder.com/tools/charts/router/bar/119-5-ghz-profile-dn/35

VPN really depends on the provider. Some have lots of bandwidth and others do not. Be careful though it puts quite a bit of cpu load on your machine to do the encryption at higher rates. In general it makes little difference but you need to monitor it to be sure it does not affect other things running in your machine.

 

[Oporhatch]

I will assume the number is actually 433 on the wifi status. This represent the way the data is encoded more than the speed. What you can tell from this number is you using 80mhz channel width on 5G and you are getting very good signal levels. It is only using 1 antenna/feed. It is possible to overlap up to 4 but both the router and the end device must have 4 antenna. Now going from 1 to 2 antenna does give more but it is nowhere close to double. Going from say 2-3 is even less gain. It is actually transmitting overlapping signals and hoping it can sort the data out at the far end. Does not work as well in real life as it does on paper.

This site should set you expectations a little better. When you see the rates at a average distance from the router are under 300 and this is using the fancy 4x4 antenna devices on both ends. The nic cards for pc that have 4 antenna are very very rare so even these numbers tend to be higher than you will ever get.

https://www.smallnetbuilder.com/tools/charts/router/bar/119-5-ghz-profile-dn/35

VPN really depends on the provider. Some have lots of bandwidth and others do not. Be careful though it puts quite a bit of cpu load on your machine to do the encryption at higher rates. In general it makes little difference but you need to monitor it to be sure it does not affect other things running in your machine.

reply

Thanks for this information .......the device as 4 antenna's, I was wondering whether to disconnect 3 and go through 1 by1 to make sure they are all working and then also add 2 then 3, then 4 to see if there is any difference

regards

 

[bill001g]

It is more complex than just the number of antenna you can see it depends how many are connected to each radio.

Maybe your router has 4 antenna but the nic in the machine likely does not.

You are already only using 1 connection that is what the 433 speed means you would see the number 867 in most cases if you are using 2x2

 

[Oporhatch]

Thanks for the reply...........I did a bit of antenna pointing and running around with my laptap with wifi analyser
Next to the wife i get a -36 dbs reading , which was pretty steady - behind the TV (where some of the devices exist was -44dbs. move the Router beside the telly and pointed a couple of antenna's toward the device at the back.....I was then getting a reading of -36 behind the TV .
I do believe my speedtest tool I use (Analiti ) is causing some heartache !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

[bill001g]

Antenna you find on most routers are what are called omni directional. The best signal comes out the side of the antennas not the top. So actually pointing them at the device reduces the amount of signal. But inside a house your signals are bouncing off all kinds of stuff so there is no way to say for sure what antenna position is best. It will change as your walk though a room and your body absorbs signals.

 

[Oporhatch]

On another point but in line with this topic...............what difference does the top of the range router make. I currently have an Archer C5 but C9 is out on the market, I have also been looking at somne ASUS routers , quite happy to pay over £200+ if it improves the situation

 

[bill001g]

Mostly it is brand name premium. Asus can get away with charging more. TPlink is kinda a exception. They provide very good support, and their products have very advanced features in their OS but they are cheap. Unlike a say a company like belkin that almost never patches product that is over a year old and has very basic features. The strange thing is belkin owns linksys also.

Asus can be argued has more features but you have to need those features. I like asus because of the third party merlin firmware which asus indirectly supports. Much more stable than say dd-wrt.

Performance wise its all a shell game at least when you are talking wifi.

The wifi function is almost completely contained within wifi chips. Almost nothing is done by the main router OS or cpu. The software that runs in the wifi chip is provided by the manufacture. This is partially done to make fcc certification easier.

What it means to the end user is router that use the same wifi chipset pretty much get the same performance. None of the major router manufactures make their own chipset they buy them from companies like meditek or broadcomm.

In addition modern routers all pretty much put out the legal maximum power so the distance the signal will go will be the same.

 

[Oporhatch]

Mostly it is brand name premium. Asus can get away with charging more. TPlink is kinda a exception. They provide very good support, and their products have very advanced features in their OS but they are cheap. Unlike a say a company like belkin that almost never patches product that is over a year old and has very basic features. The strange thing is belkin owns linksys also.

Asus can be argued has more features but you have to need those features. I like asus because of the third party merlin firmware which asus indirectly supports. Much more stable than say dd-wrt.

Performance wise its all a shell game at least when you are talking wifi.

The wifi function is almost completely contained within wifi chips. Almost nothing is done by the main router OS or cpu. The software that runs in the wifi chip is provided by the manufacture. This is partially done to make fcc certification easier.

What it means to the end user is router that use the same wifi chipset pretty much get the same performance. None of the major router manufactures make their own chipset they buy them from companies like meditek or broadcomm.

In addition modern routers all pretty much put out the legal maximum power so the distance the signal will go will be the same.

Reply

That's interesting - as when you read about router's there is always a top ten best routers, which tend to be the expensive ones........I am going to buy a new router later in the year and it will be interesting to see if there is a different . at that point I will take into consideration what you have said above ...thanks again

regards

 

[Oporhatch]

Again looking for somebody with more knowledge than me ...when I looked at the free software netspot
at the top of the list with a -12dbs was a SSID which is not part of my network. My 5ghz (not near the router) was displaying .40dbs.....and second in the list.
Taking that the stats are coming from my router, how can something that is nowhere near the router have a stronger signal than my devices which are nearer the router. When I moved my laptop close I got -33bps.......but still not -12bps.

could this be impacting me - is there a way that you can stop you router seeing this SSID

regards

 

[bill001g]

Is that on the same channel or different channels. Wifi is strange in materials in the house block certain frequencies more than others. Also depending on the country different channels have different legal maximum transmit power.

You would think that device is in your house. There are many devices that create their own SSID, Roku is one of offenders. It creates its own network for the remote, what is strange is it puts it on the strongest network it can find even though it does not connect to the network.

In general the SSID itself means nothing. You can't actually see the real problem with any scanner. The SSID is a simple message being sent by a router. You really have no way to know if that router is idle or someone is running bit torrent over it. It is the end devices that are the problem but there is no way without hacking tools to even see them much less see how much traffic they are sending.

I used to configure my router to put out a huge number of SSID on the channels I was using hoping to scare away people who run scanners to find open channels. Even though I was only using 1 SSID for traffic it appeared as though there were lots of people using that channel.

In the end you can't do much about interference. in most cases you can not even see all the sources. A cordless phone can easily interfere and since it does not run wifi you can't see it.

What you actually need to see interference is a spectrum analyzer which is very costly. There are some very limited one as part of ubiquiti products. It is a free extra feature. It displace signal energy rather than say ssid. You can for example see a microwave oven that also operates on the 2.4g band. One of the cheapest devices that has this is a outdoor directional bridge called a LOCO. About $50. You have to pick 2.4g or 5g models they do not run on both. The directional antenna helps you actually locate stuff. It can also run the same wifi SSID scanner and you can see the DB levels change as you point it.

 

[Oporhatch]

Thanks for that info....it is actually on a different channel..I will have take a look at the LOCO

Thanks again
regards