Question Why does my WDS bridges network crap out once a day or so?

[ayushr01]

So I have a TP-Link Archer C50 v1 router and a Huawei pocket router. When my dad purchased his phone line he got a pocket router with his plan and on its own it provides pretty decent speeds of upto 25mbps down and 10mbps up.
I being a 17 year who watches tons of movies and YouTube, decided I wanted in on that speed rather than using the shitty cable wifi (2mbps) we have at home.
So, I set up my existing Archer C50 as a slave router using the WDS bridging option. All it does is extend the network under a different SSID, the main router takes care of IP allocation and renewal. The network is on channel 6, 2.4Ghz. I decided on channel 6 after using wifi analyser to find that it is the least crowded non overlapping channel in my area.
It works for the most part but suddenly once in 5-10 hours or even sometimes more than that, the network just craps out completely. To fix it all I have to do is restart the SLAVE router not the main Huawei one.

Does anybody know what could be causing this and how I can fix this?

 

[bill001g]

Be careful if that is a mobile broadband there maybe a monthly data cap.

Wifi is extremely hard to troubleshoot. Most the equipment does not produce any form or error messages. The tools that look for networks are overly simplistic. On the 2.4g band the so called channels are only 5mhz wide but the signals used by wifi are either 20mhz or 40mhz wide. Almost all modern routers are using 40mhz channel width to get more speed. This means it uses 8 of those so called channels. There is only 60mhz of total bandwidth to use on 2.4g so it is impossible to fit 2 40mhz signals in without them overlapping.

Pretty much if you detect anyone else using the 2.4g bandwidth you can almost be sure they will interfere with you.

5g has very similar issues but there the channel numbers the router uses are 20mhz each but 802.11ac uses 80mhz so blocks of 4 channels.

It is highly likely it is just interference but there is not much you can set or change. Because the government wants to limit illegal power levels they have greatly restricted what you can see or configure on wifi radio chips

 

[ayushr01]

Be careful if that is a mobile broadband there maybe a monthly data cap.

Wifi is extremely hard to troubleshoot. Most the equipment does not produce any form or error messages. The tools that look for networks are overly simplistic. On the 2.4g band the so called channels are only 5mhz wide but the signals used by wifi are either 20mhz or 40mhz wide. Almost all modern routers are using 40mhz channel width to get more speed. This means it uses 8 of those so called channels. There is only 60mhz of total bandwidth to use on 2.4g so it is impossible to fit 2 40mhz signals in without them overlapping.

Pretty much if you detect anyone else using the 2.4g bandwidth you can almost be sure they will interfere with you.

5g has very similar issues but there the channel numbers the router uses are 20mhz each but 802.11ac uses 80mhz so blocks of 4 channels.

It is highly likely it is just interference but there is not much you can set or change. Because the government wants to limit illegal power levels they have greatly restricted what you can see or configure on wifi radio chips

Thanks for the reply. I’ve tried everything trying to figure out what’s causing this.

Do you think switching to 5Ghz would help? I’m worried it’ll affect my range as the range is already trash in corners of our apartment.

 

[bill001g]

Its worth a try. There are more channels on 5g and like your signals the neighbors signals have more issue getting through the walls. It is very hit and miss with wifi in apartments. It greatly depends what other people are actually doing with the wifi it causes much more issues when they are actively using it than just letting it open.

 

[doolittle]

Instead of WDS bridging, try the repeater or extender modes - I have seen the option in the C7 not sure if it's there in the C50, if it's there worth a try to see if that's more stable or not.

 

[bill001g]

Instead of WDS bridging, try the repeater or extender modes - I have seen the option in the C7 not sure if it's there in the C50, if it's there worth a try to see if that's more stable or not.

Problem is you must use the WDS feature to even attempt this unless you run in router mode. Wifi is designed to prevent you from doing exactly what is being done by a repeater/extender etc. The encryption key used for the session back to main router uses the mac address of the device. This in theory prevents any other device from passing over the connection. WDS is basically a hack that all the repeater makers came up with as a method to pass the mac address of other devices. I do not think it was ever incorporated into the official wifi standards but all the manufactures do it the same way. Pretty much you can not make a repeater function on any encrypted connection without WDS.