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> I've seen people tell me to get a 5GHz capable AP and a dongle. But this shouldn't be needed.

You can't have the cake and eat it too: 2.4 GHz propagates through walls, so you share the spectrum with your neighbors; 5 GHz is much more easily blocked by walls, but that also means you have the (much larger) spectrum to yourself.

> 5GHz doesn't go that far, so I'd need to buy an AP for pretty much every room.

Well, for every room that you need a stable connection in. If you can see your neighbor's signals that well through (presumably) multiple walls, I suspect that you'll also be able to cover at least one extra room per 5 GHz AP so that calls don't drop while you're moving between rooms.

No, I can only see their 2.4GHz networks. Well, I can see 1 5GHz network when sitting downstairs and that's the one they have in their backyard.

> I've seen people tell me to get a 5GHz capable AP and a dongle. But this shouldn't be needed.

And yet, it sure sounds like it is! If your neighbor won't change the situation, and your outcomes are entirely dependent on them or you doing so, then you're left with taking an action that you normally wouldn't have to.

Or, depending on your needs, perhaps you can use Powerline adapters to some rooms.

As someone who works in a physics lab, I offer you the piece of advice that all physics labs go to first: try wrapping it in foil.

I was thinking: take a larger canvas picture and put aluminum foil or window screen on the back. If you hang it in the right spot, it might block out a large portion of your neighbor's wifi signal.

Or buy WiFi blocking paint and painting the shared walls with it.

> get a 5GHz capable AP and a dongle. But this shouldn't be needed

Don’t think you’ve got much of a choice if you value your sanity.

You could also try powerline adapters in combination with 5ghz

De-auth until they get the picture: good luck fox hunting for whoever is emitting these frames.

Well actually... If they know that someone is shitting around with de-auth frames, they probably will find out in no-time (I'm the only one around this block that is known to have knowledge of anything tech related).

Kind curious; you have obviously talked to the neighbor. What's their attitude? Do they just not care about the problems that are causing you and others?

They generally do not care no and often try to brush it off as "as long as it's legal, I'm fine with it"... and I'd have no ground to stand on with that since it's technically legal here...

Consider moving to 5GHz and installing a few metal reflectors/surfaces to direct the signal that comes though doorways and other openings about the house. If your ceilings are plaster you might be able to get up in the roof space and set up a bunch of reflectors to direct the energy though the ceilings and over the tops of the walls. The total cost could be a roll of aluminum foil, as used in cooking.

Mikrotik, has great support for mesh networks and managing multiple AP, if you want to go that route. (and combine 2g with 5g)

Another route might be using ethernet over power lines, and then have 5g points in rooms that need it.

But essentially , everywhere I need to do things that require bandwidth, I just pull 1gb ethernet cable. Sure it's not as convenient, and pulling cables is a pain, but once you do those things it just works.

I know, my AP is wired up to my core infra. But even then it'd still not solve the issue at hand. It's treat the symptoms not the disease.

I mean we all know what the solution is.

Get an agreement with your neighbor.

You could have shared mesh network, each (you, neighbor) with it's own vlan. You both win, great coverage and bandwith for both, and your AP's wouldn't fight (and cheaper too, since you need less overall AP's).

If talking is out, then you are only left with suboptimal options. Depending where you live mobile 5/4g might also be an option.

> your AP's wouldn't fight

That's not how 802.11 medium access works: If two access points are on the same network, fairness should be identical in the "one AP, two VLANs" and the "two APs/SSIDs" cases.

On the other hand, if the issue is due to super slow legacy devices that just hog airtime, a single modern AP also won't help.

AP's woudn't fight because you would not need 2 AP's to cover same area.

Instead of using 4 seperate AP's for 2 houses, you could set them up to only use 3 or even 2.

And if you use mesh, (that mictotik can) you get benefit of roaming between them.

APs don't "fight" (or more accurately: they always fight in a fair and standardized way, even in a single AP network). Medium access works the same between stations and APs on a different SSID (on the same frequency) as it does on a single AP/SSID.

It's a bit different on distinct but overlapping frequencies, since detecting a busy medium has to happen on the physical rather than the MAC layer, but if both APs are on the same frequency (and supporting the same maximum speed), the number of APs and SSIDs is mostly irrelevant.

This might change a bit when thinking about MU-MIMO, but I doubt that 2.4 GHz only IoT devices support that.

Personally, I use a combination of wireless and physical cables. Not necessarily the most elegant solution, but it works.

Wireless has been great for a while, but I found it does not scale the way I would like it to, especially given the explosion of wireless devices out there.

> And just saying "Would you stop using all this smarthome junk so we can have a decently working wifi" also isn't really gonna cut it for them.

then fuck em, pwn their network.