strange wifi evening outages

Zaph0d

Can anyone help me diagnose this problem?

A mate of mine bought a linksys wireless-g router to go with his IBB ripwave box. He bought two belkin wifi-g cards for his two pcs. Set it all up and it all worked fine. Then one evening the PCs lost connection to the WLAN. This happened for a few hours at a time most evenings from around 7pm. Restarting the router didn't help.

First I upgraded the router firmware: problem persisted.

Next I swapped out his router for mine which is the same model but the problem persisted and my WLAN has worked fine with his router. Conclusion: it's not the router.

I got him to use a cable connection from one PC into the router and he found that he could continue to use the internet from the wired PC but the other machine was losing connectivity most nights. Conclusion: it's not the Ripwave box.

The machine that is losing connectivity is about 5m from the wireless router in the room below.

They have a DECT phone but I have the same model with no interference problems.

before I drill a hole in my mate's ceiling and wire up his other PC and completely give up on wireless in his house, has anyone any clue what could be going on here?

Could it be:
Intereference fornm the neighbour turning on some weird machine every night?
A problem with Belkin cards and linksys routers?
Anything else?
I'd love to hear your ideas.

daveirl

This post has been deleted.

JoyPad

Interference, for sure.
When it's not working, try changing the channel on the wireless access point.

Don;t forget we're waiting for feedback.

Cheers,
JP

Zaph0d

JoyPad wrote:

Interference, for sure.
When it's not working, try changing the channel on the wireless access point.

I'll give that a try.

Superman

I heard someone say that those video sender boxes can mess things up and they had the same kind of problem as you, so could be that!

thund3rbird_

has to be something that uses the 2.4GHz band

microwave - doubt it if happening for a few hours
cordless phone - ditto (unless very chatty neighbours??)
baby monitor - posibly given the times ??? (altho these usually these use low VHF freq AFAIK)
video sender

some suggestions:

try finding out who nearby arrives home just before the problem occurs.
then ask if they are turning on anything that might cause a prob.

check the belkin utility when all is ok

then check when problem is there
has signal deteriorated? has noise increased?.

in case someone nearby is trying to piggyback with a specified IP which would cause conflicts turn on WEP / WPA (u don't mention if it's on or not).
however, [i'm assuming] windows will tell you if there are 2 networked devices with the same ip address if this was the case.

try only allowing specified MAC addresses access to the router

turn off router & check if any other wi-fi networks nearby via the belkin utility

drill hole in ceiling & hardwire it

daveirl

This post has been deleted.

Zaph0d

I never found the source of interference. I did fix the problem by changing the channel.

Thanks to all of you.