Wireless gone to pieces - DITMOBILE responsible?

Hayte

I live in Stepaside in Dublin 18 - a housing estate in the middle of nowhere and currently have UPC's 20mb broadband package. Recently I've noticed dialup speeds, repeated loss of wireless signal and corresponding disconnects every 10 seconds to 10 minutes. This will occur throughout the day but is worst at peak times (evenings and weekends).

So I started doing some testing and changed my wireless channel which was defaulting to 1. Unfortunately, I can't change it to any other channel that doesn't overlap since my neighbors are on channel 6 and 11 and some other person is broadcasting a pretty strong signal on 4. I've moved to 6, 7 and 11, currently on 7 and I'm getting about 25kbps down and 6.8 kbps up. So its better than dial up but still painfully slow.

Even though my connection speed is now really slow I've noticed that I have crucially stopped disconnecting after moving away from channel 1. So I fire up InSSIDer to get a better sense of whats going on and I find there are a tonne of ad hoc unsecure network access points broadcasting on channel 1. They are mostly called DITMOBILE and ditwifi and the signal is really strong - they are all about 10db below mine.

Are these Dublin Institute of Technology public access points? If so why are they broadcasting in a residential estate? Either way, I can't connect to any of them.

I've contacted UPC and they have escalated my enquiry. I'll hear from them again on Monday and I explained all of the above to them. I strongly suspect this has nothing to do with UPC's service however.

lucernarian

Why don't you use channel 13? It only overlaps with channels 10 and 11 (and a bit of 9 if you use the practically obsolete 802.11b mode)

The ad hoc networks are caused by your neighbour's Windows XP laptop(s) copying the name of some ad hoc network it connected to previously and then replicates this as an ad hoc network of its own. http://8help.osu.edu/3655.html

Free Public Wifi is the most common SSID that shows up but I've seen others like Free Internet and the likes at college.

Hayte

Channel 11 is used by my neighbor on the right and his signal strength is about the same as mine. The others have much lower signal strength - about 30 to 40dB below mine except for all the adhoc stuff on channel 1. I'm switching to 13 now but at this point I'm still getting sub ISDN speeds from about 10 years ago.

My biggest problem is provisionally solved though - I've stopped disconnecting all the time. I can tolerate slow internet but I can't deal with it disconnecting every 10 minutes. Just having to reload stuff, have downloads fail, lose live streams etc was a major hassle.

Edit: After moving to 13 I'm getting 8mb/s down and 2mb/s up so its alot better. Before I got invaded by DITMOBILE however I was getting between over 15mb/s down and 2mb/s up. Well at least the internet is usable now at least.

Edit 2: To_be_confirmed was correct. Only it was a housemate's friend with a WinXP laptop and tonnes of DIT open access points set to automatically connect (even when not in range). We deleted all of them and I can now use channel 1 again without disconnecting every 10 minutes. Whodathunk? Good call though!