Issue with speeds and coverage

[techIntraining]

I live in an apartment complex. There are multiple people within range using WiFi causing interference. Wifi is fine in parts of the apartment, but get to far away from the WiFi router and the speeds are horrible on 2ghz, and cannot connect to 5GHz.

I cannot run cable in the apartment, girlfriend hates to see wires. I tried a cheaper older power line, to another wifi router I have. I only achieved about 7 to 10mbps on that as it seems there is a different circuit in this room.

So what can I do. Get a new wifi router that would have better range, get a newer/beter powerline and see if it will increase speed?

Any advice would be helpful.

 

[smorizio]

use a usb wifi dongle or a laptop. use 3 party wifi software to see all of the routers and what channel there on. then try using channels that there not on.

 

[techIntraining]

I did and its not on the same channel as anyone else. The 2.4 has interference issues as all the channels are taken. But the 5ghz wont connect at times when its on a different channel. Im assuming because of the distance. The router being used is the netgear 6220. I also purchased an AC 1200 usb dongle NIC for the computer, thats having this issue.

 

[bill001g]

Get a different girlfriend

This is the "new" problem with wifi. Used to be you worried about how much output power your router has and what channels it runs on etc etc. Now days all routers put out pretty much maximum power and things like the tri-band routers use almost all the available bandwidth using a single device. This causes lots of interference between people living close to each other. So the manufactures instead of trying to come up with a solution start selling mesh garbage. Now everyone has more and more radios in every apartment causing even more interference.

The actual problem is all the signals coming in from your neighbors. Your router likely is transmitting at the maximum legal level so it would be unlikely a different router would have better coverage. That takes digging through FCC data based to get the actual output power. But it may not be your router it could be your end device and there is little you can do to increase the power output of things like your cell phone.

I would look at the newer powerline units. The ones based one AV2 work much better than the older models. Many people can get over 100mbps on many of them. It greatly depends on your powerline in the house...at least any interference is something inside your house and not your neighbors. You would then plug a AP or router running as a AP inot the remote powerline unit. They make ones with AP built in but I don't know how well those work.