Why do channels other than 1/6/11 not give me any speed?

[criel]

Hi all

My parents house is like an anti-wireless zone. I cannot seem to get any sort of speed on their wireless network and week after week I've been trying to find the issue. They have a 2.4GHz router, bought probably 2 years ago. Everyone around them in the neighborhood looks like they also have 2.4GHz router as well and most of them are using channel 1/6/11. I read that if too many people around your access point using the same channel, it kills the speed.

I tried using any of the other 11 channels and 1/6/11 give me some initial speed, jumping from 30MB/s and dropping to <100kb/s. I figured I could try to move to channel 2/3/4/7/8/9/10 since no one around us is using those but anytime I do, my laptop will not connect to the wireless network anymore. Why is this? Why do only channels 1/6/11 work well enough to allow me to connect? Why can't I use a channel that no one else is using to avoid this interference?

The router they have is NETGEAR WNR2000V3

 

[bill001g]

The main reason for the confusion is on 2.4g a channel in the router is 5mhz wide. The signal used by 802.11 wifi is either 20mhz or 40mhz. There is only a total of 60mhz of bandwidth.

What it means is that you need 4 or 8 of what the router is calling channels to contain a signal. When you look at mapping this out you get channels 1,6,11 as the only ones that work and do not overlap. This is only for 20mhz though. When you use 40mhz which almost everyone does it actually uses the top 2/3 or the bottom 2/3 of the bandwidth.

You best bet is to set it to use only 20mhz channels and then use channels 1,6 or 11. Even then channels 1 and channel 11 are more likely to be free since everyone trying to use 40mhz will use the center part of the band.

When you choose say channel 3 you signals overlap both the people who choose channel 1 and the people who choose channel 6.

No good solution for this. There is only so much radio bandwidth and when everyone competes for it in a high density area nobody gets much of anything.