Internet connection regularly cutting out

hb1547 said:

I'm using AES. Here's the inSSIDer graph of channels:



I'm "YOUR_TEARING_ME_APART_LISA" (I'm not the one who can't spell...).
Our router uses two channels, a primary and secondary as I understand. The primary is the one I set (I picked 8), and the secondary is automatically set to be 4 below or 4 above (so now the secondary is 4).

The signal is weaker than some of the others, but this is because I'm in the back room of the house, farthest from the router. The relatively weaker signal hasn't been much of an issue before.

Ok a couple of problems here.

First off unless the signal strength is very strong with minimal overlap you do not want to be using channel bonding "two channels", channel bonding only works well with a very strong signal and minimal overlapping of channels. I see some major overlapping channels there as well.

To turn off channel bonding, there will be a setting in your routers wireless page that says 20-40mhz which is dual channel mode, you need to set that to 20Mhz.

From what insider is showing me the only halfway clear channel appears to be channel 1 so set your channel there and test out for wireless connection drop outs.

hb1547 said:

I don't think there is a setting to disable channel bonding, after much hunting. The router is a wnr1000v2 from Netgear, it's just one of those generic routers which Comcast lets you borrow for free.

After hunting around online a bit, it seems that Comcast prevents you from easily updating the firmware, and there are no new versions of firmware from Comcast (though there are several from Netgear). I'll look and see if there's a way to upgrade the firmware anyways -- perhaps that'll add a setting to disable the channel bonding.

Do you think that's the definite cause? Interference? Should I just buy a new router and say the hell with Comcast (something I find myself saying more and more all the time...)

I'd say that channel overlap combined with a weak connection and using dual band mode is probably to blame.

Most likely the router has a setting for this though it may show up as something other than 20-40Mhz, it's hard to say which setting it might be.

If this is one of those generic modem/router combo's or a Comcast freebie router then I'd consider using a better dual band wireless 802.11n router.

However, the dual band feature won't do you much good unless you have dual band 2.4Ghz/5Ghz wireless adaptors on your machines. You can also purchase USB dual band adaptors.

Sorry to update an older topic, but I've since realized that it may not solely be interference like we'd figured in this topic.

One of my roommates was away for a week or two and I never had any issues with the connection dropping -- in fact I had an SSH window running 3 or 4 days straight and it never dropped.

However, the roommate has since returned and the problems began again. I can only speculate that it's because she seems to watch a lot of Netflix, but I can't confirm that the connection only drops out then -- in fact it may drop out other times as well.

Any ideas?