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Comment by away_throw | Hacker News Reader

Hardware still uses a single band WLAN. Unfortunately, I won't be able to use it because of this. The 2.4GHz band in my apartment complex is severely degraded due to the sheer amount of channel conflicts. My Netgear router can only handle 2-5Mbps.

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I put an elevator flyer that simply had a cartoon router saying: "Is your wifi slow? We're all yelling over each other. Switch to channel 1,6, or 11! Email <me> if you want help."

And then in 12pt I explained it with a QR code for a web page.

Of the 30 or so SSIDs on random channels, we got half off them in about three months. Performance was significantly improved. Many were happy. Some couldn't tell. One was angry at me for apparently causing something completely unrelated.

If you want to meet the neighbours, do this.

I can see 120 SSIDs from my balcony. I gave up on trying to do this. The only solution is to run my choice of channels in the 5100 to 5250 range, which mostly blasts over the noise floor caused by my neighbors because 5.x GHz doesn't go through concrete floors/ceilings and walls very well.

And then I moved the 2.4 GHz into a 20 MHz wide channel, the cleanest I could find (it's all equally bad), narrower channel cuts through the noise slightly better than 40. Of course at the expense of throughput. But the only things that are 2.4 only here are like, a raspberry pi zero w.

At some point it probably makes sense to line each apt in rf blocking sheets and then have only your own wifi inside. Would cause problems with guests on 4g though.

I wonder if that's legal. Big apartment buildings that block cell signals and whatnot.

It’s illegal to jam signals but I can’t imagine it’s illegal to shield from them. Just concrete does it well enough.

It's not illegal to have copper wallpaper or whatever, if you want to go full faraday cage. Passive signal blocking is legal. There might be a few situations (movie theatre?) where you would want to install a big obvious sign stating that wireless devices will not communicate outside the room. It's really no different than being in the third level sub-basement of a concrete parking garage.

Jammers are not legal, unless you're operating them in a shielded RF test chamber.

It would make more sense to just have one fat pipe for the whole building and one wifi network with multiple APs.

Or just a municipal wifi that everyone in town could share.

But hey, capitalism, gotta have everyone paying $39.99/month to clog up the airwaves with redundant SSIDs.

It would also drain the battery of any phone you forget to switch to wifi-only. Most phones, when dealing with tenuous or absent xG signal, will try harder and harder to transmit.

Consumer routers shouldn't even make it an option to choose something other than 1,6,11 without entering a special code or something.

I use all 3 of 1,6 and 11 myself :')

However I have all my APs on very low power so that roaming works well within my apartment. In fact some of the neighbors' APs are stronger in my living room than my own ceiling mounted one!

I'm glad I don't need 2.4 much anymore for performance devices but most IoT gizmos don't do 5.

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