Hi Linus, too many routers? I have three routers and use 5 g of band. Put it at 160 MHz. No problems from the neighbors etc. Niels from the Netherlands.
2:32 When representing Pros & Cons, I recommend using - for Cons and + for Pros. It would be colorblind friendly. You can also use colors (red and green) like you have.
blocking your whole apartment block's wifi is as simple as getting a bunch of WiFi AP's and powering them up, with no tinkering required at all. thanks Linus!
@@FlyboyHelosim Yeah 100%, hardwired all the way! When we had to get new flooring, I thought it would be the perfect time to run cable under the floor boards and get ethernet sockets to every room in the house. I'm pretty handy with tech so I thought "Oh this would be a nice weekend project". How wrong was I. Several weekends later learning as I went, and I finally finished. Totally worth it but if there ever is a next time, I think I'll pay a professional for their blood sweat and tears rather than using up my own.
I work with .11 at large scale. This was quite well done, guys! Before .11b, we were using 2.4Ghz for "dot eleven prime" adopted in '97... and it was used for pre-.11 wireless networking protocols as well. Beyond standard good practices around channel planning - avoid overlap, go narrower to get more space before reuse), there are other things we can do to squeeze out more performance... As you noticed, a bunch of APs in a room with no clients connected will still hammer the medium with management traffic. In high density wifi, we try to spend as little time on management frames as we can, so we can spend as much time as possible on data payload to client STAtions. All this management frame traffic is transmitted at "basic rates" for backwards compatibility. The highest basic rate is 54Mbps... and the lowest is 1! We often set our lowest basic rate at 12Mbps. This makes a huge impact on the amount of time we have to spend on management frames, significantly reducing non-productive channel utilization. While doing management frames at 12Mbps or higher means locking out legacy .11 prime and .11b devices, we are almost always OK with that here in 2024. We also try to filter broadcast and multicast as much as possible at the AP (I'm looking at you, ARP!), and convert it to unicast whenever we can -- bcast and mcast go over the basic rates! Unicast goes on the nice high speed HT/VHT/HE/EHT rates. Finally, we try to reduce the number of SSIDs we blast into the air, as each carries its own management overhead. This really ads up beyond 3-4 SSIDs. My dream is always to keep it to two SSIDs -- one using dot1x authentication backed by a RADIUS server which can authorize differentiated access privileges for devices on the same SSID, and the other the proverbial open SSID for guests. Today, that open SSID typically means another hidden SSID (which consumes no less mgmt overhead than an unhidden SSID) to accommodate OWE, which is a good thing and is worth it. When we have to light up "specialty SSIDs", we keep them isolated to only the area where they're required.
It's a very common problem, and oddly even some installers are not fully aware. A friend runs a business rolling out IT infra in schools and offices, and is often asked to debug existing installs. He usually starts with removing every other WiFi access point. And usually it leads to a huge improvement.
Yep. More APs can also be the solution if you plan for 5ghz (and now 6). For these types of installs you shouldn't install anything or fix anything without a survey which is what I am assuming your friend does. Survey -> Plan -> Deploy -> Survey in this order with a good planning tool and you can make office/ school wifi kick ass. And yeah... Sometimes the solution is less APs, sometimes it is more.
@@borphos I hope that's what our IT director will do. I work in K-12 IT and I think he's planning on rolling out Wi-Fi 7 at a few schools within the next 6 months. I really hope he at least gets a good site survey done
I gotta ask, was it smart for me to move the 5ghz wifi into channel 104? the router is completely alone there that's why I did it, I know it disconnects once a day or something to check for interference with government stuff but are there any other drawbacks from using this?
@@borphos He definitely does proper planning. But if he sees too many APs, he always starts with yeeting a few. Gives the client confidence that they hired the right guy, if they see an immediate improvement.
"You live in a windowless apartment with neighbours on all six sides" Well that's definitely the first time my specific living situation has been brought up in a UA-cam video 😂😂
It must be nice to have to walk past inside other people's houses to get in or out of yours. But who am I kidding? You never leave your house. Touching grass is for wimps.
I work at a University. Back in the days before nearly every device being dual band, unconfirmed wireless printers killed 2.4 at certain spots in the dorms. When they are unconfigured they act as an AP. We could swap channels around a bit but you ran the risk of causing interference somewhere else, so the best thing to do was to have those students tell their neighbors to either configure their printers wifi, or turn it off and use a USB cable. Now we band steer to 5 and either turn the 2.4 radios way down, or leave them at normal power, but turn about half of them off. We also buy APs now that are dual band, but one of the radios is a soft radio that can be 2.4 or 5 and run about half of the APs in dual 5Ghz mode. We do this because, why waste a radio that can't help us on coverage if we can use it to add capacity. This effectively means that unless you have a very old or embedded device, we have nearly abandoned 2.4. Band steering used to be somewhat problematic as it wasn't really a part of any standard, but they got it dialed in. As mentioned in the video WiFi 7, in trying to solve another problem, ended up with built in band steering. The other problem that the feature solves is that with so many challels in 6Ghz + 5Ghz, it was taking forever for your device to scan for APs. So now APs can announce that they have multiple radios and that they have neighboring APs. Theis effectively means that the AP is doing the scanning for the connecting device. It also helps devices transition to other APs more efficiently as they start to leave range, or if the AP they are on is congested. I'm looking forward to using 7 APs even if we don't get all tri-band APs because 7 allows us to use 2.4Ghz, and 5Ghz more effectively even if we don't have 6Ghz nearby. In high capacity areas 6Ghz will be really nice to have. The best thing to ever happen to large scale wireless deployments is wifi planning and survey software like Hamina and ekahau. I highly reccomend using a planning tool, even for a personal deployment in an apartment. As mentioned in the video, don't rely on the APs to auto-pick a channel. Measure for a bit and select one yourself, or better yet, hav planning software make a channel plan. The free tools help a lot. While I don't use them professionally most of the time, I can confirm that everything I have used of ubiquiti's hardware and software (which is quite a lot) is excellent and is often appropriate in a professional setting. In an apartment, talking to your neighbors also helps a lot.
I remember sometimes seeing my university IT staff in 2013 going around the dorm hallways with scanners to triangulate which dorm had a printer blocking network access. And then fine that dorm.
11:45 lowering your transmit power. I have been in IT for 25 years everytime I tell someone that they think I am crazy! I can't tell you how glad I am to hear you say this haha!
I manage wifi networks in MDU's. We often use the 'minimum' setting in AP's and still have plenty of neighboring accesspoints. Once I thought about disabling radio's but that would make life pretty hard for us. Luckily we don't have that many clients on them and the ruckus radio's switch pretty fast.
Would be more effective to use an 800 watt microwave magnetron imo. If the door was removed you could also use it to warm your hands or heat up a cup of coffee while also heating you form the inside out :D
you jest, but my ISP chooses the number of routers based on internet speed, not intended location. so in my 58sqm apartment i have a mesh network with 4 nodes just cause i wanted 600mbps.
This video brought back some great Wi-Fi memories for me. Back in 2000, I was part of a team installing wireless ISP backbones in apartment complexes using the extremely new 802.11 (back then) Cisco routers. We would survey the buildings to determine antenna locations and types. One day we had some fun in the office testing how different materials affected the Wi-Fi signal. We found that the brick walls were nearly transparent, while glass and metal garage doors both destroyed the signal. We had also heard a rumor that pine needles would absorb the 2.4 GHz signals, because their length matched the 2.4 GHz wave height, so we tested those too. They definitely had an effect, which was helpful to know because as we transmitted from apartment building to apartment building, we often had to aim through pine trees. We also had to worry about the Fresnel effect, basically a radio wave is biggest at the halfway point between two antennas, so it's not like you could just use a spotting scope for a clear line of sight, not even with a Yagi antenna, you still had to worry about nearby large obstructions near the midpoint. I knew a lot about Wi-Fi 24 years ago, and all that info is basically worthless these days with modern Wi-Fi being nearly plug-n-play.
From our testing, brick will attenuate about 5-7dB off of your network signal while corrugated metal walls often see 10-30dB of attenuation depending on thickness, angle of metal, and material. Interesting that you mentioned glass, as that is between 2-3dB for uncoated single-pane glass (roughly the same as wood stud drywall construction without fire retardant coatings), but many of the glass reflective coatings will be in that 10+ range as well.
Very interesting about brick having no effect but glass and metal doing a number on the signal. The bit on pine needles is cool though. You reckon there's a specific tree out there that wholly coincidentally is terrible to pass wireless signals through? Thanks for your insight.
@@Brandon318 The glass we tested wasn't normal window glass, but rather glass walls typical in an office. We had nicknamed our office area the fishbowl, because we were surrounded by heavy glass walls and coworkers could watch us like the animals we were. Not sure of the exact thickness or coatings, but I'd say it was at around 1/2" thick, and tempered of course. So perhaps thickness has an impact. Tempering might be a factor too, since normal windows are not tempered. I'd be surprised if they were coated since they didn't even see sunlight, but the coatings might have just been standard fare from the vendor. Going from very old memories, I recall the office glass begin the worst material we tested, which shocked us since we expected it to be invisible. Very interesting that your testing revealed the impact of coatings, we never even thought about that.
@@professorcryogen6419 The pine needles thing was always one of those plausible rumors that I learned from a coworker. Personally, I kind of assumed that perhaps all trees & leaves block signals, and that pine needles weren't actually special. But we only tested fresh green pine needles, no other leaves, so I've always wondered. Your comment got me googling, and I found this excellent quote: "According to Wireless Crash Course, by Paul Bedell, pine needles are organic material made up mostly of water. That means they are excellent at absorbing wireless signals known as RF Transmissions. In fact, the absorbing, or so-called “phasing” of RF signals, happens routinely around the 800 MHz frequency range. It just so happens that the length of a pine needle is equivalent to one-fourth the wavelength of a base station signal in the 800 MHz range." I guess I was wrong about the pine needle being the same length as wavelength, but rather it's a quartet. Though not mentioned here, I'd also assume that pine needles radiating out in all directions is also a big factor, maximizing coverage. Pretty cool to finally know after all these years that this rumor was absolutely true.
@@professorcryogen6419 Actually, I always assumed this was more rumor than fact. Our limited testing didn't include any other vegetation, only pine needles, and I figured other trees might be just as bad. But your comment got me to researching, and after 24 years I now have my answer - check out this quote: "According to Wireless Crash Course, by Paul Bedell, pine needles are organic material made up mostly of water. That means they are excellent at absorbing wireless signals known as RF Transmissions. In fact, the absorbing, or so-called “phasing” of RF signals, happens routinely around the 800 MHz frequency range. It just so happens that the length of a pine needle is equivalent to one-fourth the wavelength of a base station signal in the 800 MHz range." Pretty cool that this rumor was totally true, at least for 800 MHz radio waves. But I'm not sure about Wi-Fi 2.4GHz, 5 GHz, and 6 GHz. Perhaps 2.4 GHz being a multiple of 800 MHz is a factor. We only had 802.11b 2.4 GHz radios to play with back then.
Non-tech people: "OMG! It is 2024, who uses cable anymore? We have wifi!" Tech people: "What do you mean, my smart coffee maker doesn't have Ethernet port?"
@@AlphaBlog1 Cables are a lot easier to deal with because physical signal separation is a lot easier. That way you don't have to deal with the WIFI headache depicted in the video.
@@AlphaBlog1 Tech guys like myself plug anything that has an Ethernet jack in, the joke is that we rather have ethernet and run cables then deal with WiFi
I work for a small Canadian ISP that supplies fibre to each and every individual dorm room at a local college. Each room has its own dedicated AP just for the one student's use that lives in it. We have to turn the 2.4GHz radios down to 10% power for the channel to be usable!
Another thing is setting the minimum data rate to 11 mbps, because it reduces the amount of spectrum that beacon frames take up. This is actually highly effective and overlooked
@@bcredeur97 This is also great on 5 GHz, but I usually set it at 20-25 Mbps. I also religiously use 20 MHz channel width on 5 GHz - unless there are no neighbours to speak of.
@@Auziuwu I might suggest that taking too much of bandwidth is waste of frequencies and might cause a lot of interference with other APs. So basically you should take as much bandwidth (20 or 40) as you actually need, and just widening it might worse the situation a lot
Had this problem setting up wifi for a school, we couldn't use less APs because at 30 clients per AP at each classroom we needed them, so the solution was to lower the output power. We managed 50 APs in a building with over 1500 clients. This was 2012
The classic random neighbour in one of the 178 apartments in the 26-story building who has an UniFi LR AP set to maximum power running on an overlapping band, a signal strong enough to be available half a block away from the building and even on the 2nd floor of the underground parking garage. Good times.
Ah yes. I too connect all my wifi routers to tube amps. I mean, can you really call it a 'strong' wifi signal if it can't even microwave a chicken two floors down?
@@gleb.salmanov A good router and access point can become a great one with an empty can of Pringles, yet it fails to microwave anything, sadly, and one question remains unanswered: Will it blend?
i cant even explain how much i want to thank you. Im living in Germany, In an house up to 40 appartments, and each have theier own Wlan. I just switched to an cable router and tought why our Wlan was so extremly bad. Thank you very much
Back when wireless was just getting popular in 2003, I would login to troublesome default wireless routers and change their channels to more vacant parts of the spectrum, usually Channel 1 or 11. They were usually setup to use Channel 6 by default. Now most access points use Channel 1. 😂
Reminds me of the story I read of internet cut out at same 10am almost every day. Multiple ISP techs, equipment replaced...everything replaced still kept happening. Finally figured out it was the wireless link across the way...getting blocked by a delivery truck most mornings LOL
Really like being shown what is happening behind the curtain for my everyday problems. When my video hitches, what might be happening under the hood. This kind if insight is one if the things I enjoy most about the channel.
I work in internet company in my country and we usually have single band router like tplink 2 antenna and users complain about speed issues on night time like 8pm usually we have tried dual band router to users who faces issue and the issue has been fixed sometime but some non techie ones don't want to change their stupid single band router So this video helps them understand what we try to convince them
One thing to note is that in a lot of buildings in Europe you have ~20cm thick brick walls, and 2.4 GHz is the only way to get the signal to other rooms (and you cannot just drill a hole into a wall to get UTP cable to other rooms if you are renting the place)
However, that also means there are less interfering networks from your neighbours. In a large building (with 50 - 100 or even more apartments) made of reinforced concrete, which are common in my country, you would only see a few other networks, maybe 10 at most - certainly not dozens.
You can snake in a wire from the windows so that it isn’t too much of an eyesore(for the outside siding of the house, if it has one). But yeah, kinda annoying work but it’s worth it. I did this with three hardwired APs, one per floor and now have perfect 5ghz coverage on every corner on every floor of my house. It’s bliss.
It's crazy how we underestimate the impact of Wi-Fi interference! Linus really nails it here. People often think the more access points, the better... like flooding every room with Wi-Fi is the solution. But if your access points are stuck on the same channels, you're not boosting coverage, you're creating traffic jams! It's like having more roads but forcing all the cars to drive on the same lane, total chaos. The lesson here? Smarter setups beat brute force every time. If only everyone around me would manage their Wi-Fi with even a fraction of this awareness, we’d all have smoother connections.
This is exactly why I went out of my way to get a (very expensive at the time) WiFi 6E router for my apartment. The 6 GHz traffic is basically entirely clear in my building so my Quest 3 game streaming is perfect.
It's been great to be up here... 6E didn't REALLY catch on in the consumer space, but 7 will... thankfully, they should all be LPI (low-power indoor) devices which have massive advantages (low tx power, forces STAs to tx even quieter) for the condo use case... so it won't be as bad as the other bands...
@@jeffcullen6573 Not familiar with WiFi 7 technology. Isn't low power indoor setting a technician side manual setting, not an automatic hardware protocol?
@@Un1234l LPI vs SP (Standard Power) is more of a WiFi on 6GHz thing -- not necessarily a WiFi 6E or 7 thing. What you'll see is most consumer routers as well as commercial access points intended for standard indoor use cases will be LPI-class devices. Because of incumbent use in the 6GHz band, when we want to do anything more than LPI we have to use AFC - Automated Frequency Control. Read up on that... pretty wild!
As someone who has installed WiFi professionally and lives in a row house neighborhood where every house has got Fiber with a isp mandated router that had every AP pre-configured on channel 6, yes this completely kills wifi lol. I have a wi-spy too which is great be it a bit expensive for an average user :) Signal strength is good, data rate is terrible. Even from just the beacon pings. I can see about 20-25 wifi AP's in my house. You did a very good job in explaining all of this. What we really need is a higher speed/capacity at a lower frequency. Another funny quirk you can run into with auto channel scanning is that if you have AP's that can scan daily/weekly, they often all scan simultaneously which can skew results significantly. That was a fun one to discover.
You dropped this video LITERALLY as I received a bunch of Unifi APs this morning and currently provisioning them. At 13:20 what I actually did - I had my main AP in the center of the home be on "High" transmit power on 2.4ghz and "Medium" 5Ghz. The other 2 APs I set 2.4ghz to Low (both still need to reach outdoor cameras from a concrete house that my main center AP isnt getting a good signal to) and 5ghz aswell to "low". I have still MINOR interference from neighbors because in FL, they build homes very close to each other but its minor because all our houses are concrete
This is SO GREAT! I have always heard about wifi interference and how it affects thruput but this is the proof of concept to the extreme! I would love to see a ton of videos where you can test things like this.
Thank you Linus for this PSA. I didnt realize TX mattered so much until i checked how Hotel WiFi was setup. I noticed they had TX lowered to 18 db rather than my neighbors 28 db that flooded into our home. Thanks for this little known tip. Unfortunately many consumer routers do not allow this function or hide it under the professional menu. Thx for the tips!!!
one problem ive heard about, just having 802.11b support enabled will cause beacon packets to use more of the airtime advertising to 802.11b devices, requires transmitting the beacon at a lower bitrate, which means more time to transmit the packet
Beacons are usually sent using lowest speed available, some APs allow to disable slower modulation and coding schemes. Has an added benefit of limiting transmission range too.
Yes. Management frames are transmitted at the minimum supported rate. Go into your Wi-Fi settings and disable the slow ones. Nothing slower than 24 or 36 Mbps should be enabled.
Suburbian north Americans talking about wifi is always a treat. Living in a building that's in a building neighbourhood I get like 60 networks on my phone. I had two ubiquity APs that didn't cut it. Changed into an OP Asus and it's mostly fine now. At the cost of my neighbours stability, probably
This is a great video explaining wifi and interference. However, you're in IT, you've setup a network using ubiquiti equipment and you didn't enable the simplest setting (that's lately enabled by default) that optimizes your network nightly ensuring you don't have the issues you have. You can also enable band steering to push devices that support it, to use 5ghz.
“Automatically selects the best channel on startup” Wait, is that why restarting a router is such a commonly suggested (and surprisingly effective) solution for spotty internet troubles?
That can be part of it. But routers are like computers. They have a software and firmware. And with enough time, sometimes the software can have weird bugs or issues that get resolved with a simple reboot. most people don't usually reboot their routers nearly as often as they do with computers.
Most of the time it’s some kind of an issue with the router itself, like memory or firmware. Restarting takes care of all these potential issues in a single step and honestly it’s also the only way to take care of such issues, hence why it’s recommended to restart the network devices before anything else. Some routers even have an option to automatically reset once a day to avoid these issues.
I’ve been in the enterprise Wi-Fi industry for about 7 years now, and deployed it at a partner for 9 years before that. Thank you for explaining this in a way that the average person can understand. Instead of trying to walk people through this, I’m going to start sending them this video. I used to give presentations to a more technical audience. My go to was 5 reasons your WiFi sucks and how to fix it. I e often thought about turning that into a UA-cam video to help people. It goes more in details about airtime utilization, bss min rate, channel width and so much more. Designing Wi-Fi properly is an art form. One tip I have for anyone reading comments. If you have a Mac you can get the program Wi-Fi explorer pro. It’s $20. You don’t get as much detail as the wispy, but You can see airtime utilization, channel width, and other really important stuff for a very low one time cost.
Glad you made a video on this. I spent quite a bit of time trying to solve signal drops and issues on VR trackers because there was too many wifi signals sitting on the same channels. And this is also important when flying a drone, since you don't want to fly on a busy channel or at times at all if all channels are crowded.
This isn't that bad. (Well at least the first 3-4 experiments you did.) I live in a place with *VERY* old infrastructure alongside being the most densely populated area in my country.. Also my Wi-Fi dongle used to be a 10 year old oversized ASUS dongle. I used to have 1500-5000 ping in warzone. Download speed was 10 Mega *BITS* per second. Also my internet provider (and basically all of the other choices I have since they give tons of information off to 3rd party companies resulting in constant crypto and casino ads.) is basically dogwater I'm officially a LTT fanboy now. 28 seconds ago.
another thing to keep in mind if your router supports wider bandwidths (to increase speeds in theory) on both 2.4g/5g sometimes you might NOT want to use a wider bus to prevent overlapping on used channels. i can get much stabler, and faster speeds while using a narrower band, to prevent going into same channels as my neighbours are using.
This is crazy! We had WiFi cameras in our barn and we couldn’t figure out why all of them would not work. 6 out of 8 would work, I tried bigger antennas, putting the cameras closer together, which made it worse. This explains it. Too much interference. Thank you
@7:22 "a couple of dozen" ..... I do not live in an apartment (1930's in between house with no insulation at all) but a decade or so ago a sensitive wifi-adapter picked up over 200(!) networks while standing inside. Not sure how many were guest networks, if that was a thing back then, but still, that's quite a bit more.
Hi Linus! I'm a big fan of your work! One thing that should be considered is that the presence of a wifi network does not cause as much interference when it's not transmitting data. The "real" interference may occur when there are many wifi networks really sending and receiving data at the same time.
When I used to live in a student housing, every single Studio (~15 m² each with dozens per floor) had their own Router, all the exact same model in the exact same channel. After hearing my friends complaining many times about the slow wi-fi, I changed mine to channel 1, theirs to channel 6 and everyone else in the building was still in channel 11. 5x times the initial speed, but the best change was in stability
One of the best things I ever did was totally reconfigure my network *the second* the tech hooking it up initially had left the house. Between reconfiguring the network names and passwords and setting the channel and broadcast power settings I was able to go a whole 2 years before I even wanted to buy my own networking gear to replace it.
@@ryans413 I've been locked in to ISP provided routers for far too long, but my 'landline' phone has run off them since maybe around 2008. Buying and configuring a router to do the same telephony is non-trivial.
I recently noticed our 2.4GHz wasn't performing very well, and lo and behold, auto somehow chose an overlapping channel, and it's now comfortably sitting in channel 11, where it works a bit better. Sadly, all channels have stuff going on near my apartment, but channel 11 is the one where the least stuff is going on and where the other routers I see have the least signal strength
People have been telling me WiFi will replace all cabled networking any time soon for the last 10 years. Happy to see the laws of physics still apply in 2024 :D
11:59 the thing is you can put all the smart home devices on one channel because they really do not get bogged down due to the low amount of data being sent to those devices. so it would not be a problem if they were all just smart home devices.
My Internet box has factory option menus to select 2,4 GHz, 5 GHz or both. It also shows the spectrum and all the WiFi routers close to yours, so you can clearly select the best channels to use. Also, don't forget that if you use a higher channel number, you'll slightly increase your B/W (because carrier frequency also increases a bit, so the modulation allows more space for data).
Totally underrated. If you ever do a WiFi scan in the financial districts in SF or NY you would be stunned. We counted 205 2.4mHz (edit GHz) APs within range of one location. I was surprised they could even stay connected to their own network. Speed was slow.
Automatic channel selection is often completely boneheaded and a lot of the advice you see online (just use channels, 1, 6, and 11 and it will fix everything) is aimed at businesses with many access points, not individuals in a congested area with only one or two. If 1 6 and 11 are all heavily used by devices you have no control over, it can actually be better to choose an in between channel and accept the signal noise than to try to cram your router in amongst all the others on one of the non overlapping channels. As long as your router is the closest (and therefore loudest), the noise won't be a significant problem and you'll get a comparatively open "highway".
It's not about noise for using 2,3,4,5,7,8,9,10, it's about the fact that any data sent over either the designated channel or overlapping channel registering -85dBm RSSI or higher will trigger a retry instead of a transmit. So instead of impacting just one channel, you're now impacting two.
@@julius9727 When a device on a wireless network detects a signal over a certain threshold of signal strength on the same or overlapping channels, it will pause any transmissions for a randomly determined amount of time before attempting to transmit again to avoid interfering with an active transmission. Because the threshold to halt transmission is quite a bit lower than useable WiFi, it's quite possible that wireless networks you can't even see on a network selection screen as well as other 2.4GHz or 5.0GHz devices (bluetooth, wireless peripherals, etc) will impact the network.
@@Brandon318 But that's only meaningful if you control the other two channels. If all the available non-overlapping channels are so congested you can't make meaningful use of them -- which is very common in 2.4 in urban areas -- you'll have better luck trying an intermediate channel in the hopes that the noise floor is low enough to not trigger (freqent) retries. Which network admins aren't used to thinking about, because they're used to controlling the entire network space, not being forced into a situation where there are no good non-overlapping options. And, yes, it is about noise, traffic negotiation only happens within a channel, between two different channels all other signals are noise.
Great job guys... you did a very good job at depicting some common issues with Wi-Fi. Always best to use wired when possible for security, privacy, performance, reliability and sometimes cost. Wi-Fi not only doesn't reach it's advertised speeds in non-ideal conditions, and not only interferes with other APs and devices but also loses a good chunk of it's packets in the layer - there's another layer of error checking beyond TCP with Wi-Fi and it causes increased latency waiting for those packets to go through. Wireless anything is far worse for security and privacy as well. MU-MIMO doesn't solve all of the congestion issues, either.
@@insanecoolaid7299 personal, non scientific opinion: WiFi Meshing is bad and should not be your first, second, third or even your fourth choice. Pseudo scientific rationale: the same fundamental physics being explored by discount Eminem (love u Linus pls don't shadow ban me) apply to mesh WiFi too. They're just more wireless devices, but they can get very loud.
Was a tad surprised with how experienced (or maybe not) Linus is, that he would set all his AP's in house to the same auto defaulting channel. One of the first things you want to do in a multi AP setup is to tune the channels (both 2.4GHz, 5GHz and 6GHz) and transmission strength of each AP in a system. Also setting a minimum RSSI per AP can also be useful at times.
I own a townhouse and have a high density apartment complex right out my front door. I can see 50+ APs any given moment. Why don’t AP vendors add a feature in firmware to automatically dial back their transmit power in congested environments?
Because turning down the TX power in a congested area hurts the performance of the AP that's turned down - it only works if everyone agrees to do it. No brand wants to take the initiative on that since it'll make the out of the box user experience for anyone who buys it worse
Thank you so much for mentioning overlapping channels and the "safe" channels of 1, 6, and 11. Not enough people know about this, even in the IT field.
So you're simulating the typical apartment complex. Thanks. I've struggled with crappy WiFi in every apartment building I've lived in because there's always 40-60 different WiFI SSIDs around me and my bandwidth drops to under 1Mbps whehn I leave the room wher the router is.
This is similar to what happens to cellular connections rural areas with high congestion. I frequent Glamis, California, which is a giant sandbox in the middle of nowhere. During non holiday weekends the service tends to be decent and a bit spotty at times. But on a holiday weekend where there can be 25,000 people and up, service becomes nonexistent.
I used to visit family in a remote location. Needed a Phone booster just to get any real signal. Up till about 10-11pm speeds were slow. But after that it was actually usable at like 7-8Mb DN. Talked em into Starlink and it's been great for probably 3yrs now
I literally came to the same realization with my wifi setup. Had 3 nest wifi pros setup in my 2800 sqft home and would always get random disconnections. Disconnected 1 router and moved another to a more open area in the house. And now my wifi is 10x better
I love this video. Hope there is a yt shorts for people kids, grandparents and for the technically challenged people. This kind of video is a game changer for them, "IF" they watch this until the end "AND" if they understood each point.
I'm a bit disappointed you didn't touch up on - utilizing minimum data rate control - enforcing said data rate control If you don't mind limiting compatiblity with old devices then - disabling CCK data rates (1/2/5.5/11Mbps) Or if forcing higher minimum data rates causes older devices to have a hard time connecting (Edit: Though this kind of defeats the purpose of the higher minimum data rates) - Send beacons at 1Mbps/6Mbps These are essential knobs to twiddle when dealing with high-density installations. With the bone stock settings, it's no wonder things crawl to a halt even with just half a dozen AP's talking over each other (slowly).
The editing in this video was super good! Props for whoever did it or I approve of the new style! It really felt different and punchier and catchier without feeling like "hey kids look at us being all SILLY!1!"
Remember the days of unsecure wifi? Sometimes you could "IT" an entire apartment building without residents knowing. Did this more than once. Changing channels and transmit power.
I was having this exact problem with my 2.4GHz wifi between my main router and access point. Turned off the access point one, made sure the 5.0GHz were on separate bands and now I'm all set. Thanks!
As a Radio Controlled airplane enthusiast I can without a doubt say that 2.5Ghz travels through buildings. As a responsible pilot I regularly monitor the frame losses (and occasional holds). We fly close to an industrial center. As the employees start going to work we start seeing frame frame losses escalate.
I'm literally listening to this video on the aftershockz. They are my daily drivers. Sometimes my wife's like "what are you listening to" and it's nothing because I forgot they are on. So super comfortable. Also if you struggle with ear buds due to claustrophobia or sweaty ears these bypass all that.
I don'f fully get why though, can you elaborate on the reason again for me? I have connectivity issues with my ESP32s at home too (small flat, 1 central 2.4 WiFi router, not many neighbours). Adding a separate AP in literally the NEXT room (10m distance and 1 wall in between to the main AP) actually improved these problems.
@@4bSix86f61 okay, they probably have improved WiFi on the ESP32 over the 8266. Still it's not as stable or capable of longer distances as I'm used to from devices like smartphones or notebooks
Linus you could use a wlc in your home. Even if you don't want to pay for it you could just do static setting for AP 's. As an example look for interferance in your home for 2.4Ghz and turn off some of the AP's 2.4Ghz. As an another example you could just change the beacon, eirp stuff (I know those are waaay too detailed but if you think about it, makes sense bc you could set it once and it will always work on the ideal point).
On top of the mentioned auto setting downside, there are some specific problems if left unchecked. The channel usage at the spot your router is at might be different than it is on the edges of its reach. We had such a situation where the auto set channel was mostly clear near the router, but on the other side of the apartment that channel was used by 6 different other wifis. Thankfully using the phone app revealed this and I could set it up manually. Also good tip on the reduced strength!
One good feature of the UDM Pro (And, I think most Unifi controllers), is that it will scan the wifi environment around it and automatically pick a channel that isn't saturated.
I finally understand why LTT has so many employees... Background actors😂😂😂😂
i thought they were npcs
@@Crimsonoverlord. i thought they were made in unreal engine
Same
They're AI generated. Did you see the guy with 2 heads? No? Just me then? Huh.
Lol😂
The graphics team deserves a raise. Those traffic animations were immaculate.
@@WildcardZwei is that you [insert name of graphics guy] ?
So you're implying they are not well compensated for their work?
@@costafilh0no he's implying that they're doing an amazing job. "XXX deserves a raise" is a common phrase found on yt
@@kek353 I know. It was a joke. Linus made the same joke a few times on the wan show, actually. Maybe he's not the best person to copy jokes from lol
Hi Linus, too many routers? I have three routers and use 5 g of band. Put it at 160 MHz. No problems from the neighbors etc. Niels from the Netherlands.
2:32 When representing Pros & Cons, I recommend using - for Cons and + for Pros. It would be colorblind friendly. You can also use colors (red and green) like you have.
I had to chuckle how simple your solution is, then up voted and commented to help bring this to Linus and companies attention.
It's the sort of thing they seem quite conscious about but absolutely a good suggestion.
Red and green happen to be some of the worst color combinations when you want to make it friendly to color blind people.
they rely heavily on Red Green for their comedy.
Honestly, most Pro vs Con lists do use + and -, not sure why LMG dont though.
blocking your whole apartment block's wifi is as simple as getting a bunch of WiFi AP's and powering them up, with no tinkering required at all. thanks Linus!
Lowering rent prices W
NOOO staaph
Didn't even think about it like that. It's effectively a WiFi DDoS.
Meanwhile we sit happily using the internet using an ethernet cable.
@@FlyboyHelosim Yeah 100%, hardwired all the way! When we had to get new flooring, I thought it would be the perfect time to run cable under the floor boards and get ethernet sockets to every room in the house. I'm pretty handy with tech so I thought "Oh this would be a nice weekend project". How wrong was I. Several weekends later learning as I went, and I finally finished. Totally worth it but if there ever is a next time, I think I'll pay a professional for their blood sweat and tears rather than using up my own.
Using a WiFi app to adjust your WiFi to not have interference with others is underrated if you live by a lot of other people's WiFi
I work with .11 at large scale. This was quite well done, guys!
Before .11b, we were using 2.4Ghz for "dot eleven prime" adopted in '97... and it was used for pre-.11 wireless networking protocols as well.
Beyond standard good practices around channel planning - avoid overlap, go narrower to get more space before reuse), there are other things we can do to squeeze out more performance...
As you noticed, a bunch of APs in a room with no clients connected will still hammer the medium with management traffic.
In high density wifi, we try to spend as little time on management frames as we can, so we can spend as much time as possible on data payload to client STAtions.
All this management frame traffic is transmitted at "basic rates" for backwards compatibility. The highest basic rate is 54Mbps... and the lowest is 1!
We often set our lowest basic rate at 12Mbps. This makes a huge impact on the amount of time we have to spend on management frames, significantly reducing non-productive channel utilization. While doing management frames at 12Mbps or higher means locking out legacy .11 prime and .11b devices, we are almost always OK with that here in 2024.
We also try to filter broadcast and multicast as much as possible at the AP (I'm looking at you, ARP!), and convert it to unicast whenever we can -- bcast and mcast go over the basic rates! Unicast goes on the nice high speed HT/VHT/HE/EHT rates.
Finally, we try to reduce the number of SSIDs we blast into the air, as each carries its own management overhead. This really ads up beyond 3-4 SSIDs.
My dream is always to keep it to two SSIDs -- one using dot1x authentication backed by a RADIUS server which can authorize differentiated access privileges for devices on the same SSID, and the other the proverbial open SSID for guests. Today, that open SSID typically means another hidden SSID (which consumes no less mgmt overhead than an unhidden SSID) to accommodate OWE, which is a good thing and is worth it.
When we have to light up "specialty SSIDs", we keep them isolated to only the area where they're required.
It's a very common problem, and oddly even some installers are not fully aware. A friend runs a business rolling out IT infra in schools and offices, and is often asked to debug existing installs. He usually starts with removing every other WiFi access point. And usually it leads to a huge improvement.
Yep. More APs can also be the solution if you plan for 5ghz (and now 6). For these types of installs you shouldn't install anything or fix anything without a survey which is what I am assuming your friend does. Survey -> Plan -> Deploy -> Survey in this order with a good planning tool and you can make office/ school wifi kick ass. And yeah... Sometimes the solution is less APs, sometimes it is more.
@@borphos I hope that's what our IT director will do. I work in K-12 IT and I think he's planning on rolling out Wi-Fi 7 at a few schools within the next 6 months. I really hope he at least gets a good site survey done
I gotta ask, was it smart for me to move the 5ghz wifi into channel 104? the router is completely alone there that's why I did it, I know it disconnects once a day or something to check for interference with government stuff but are there any other drawbacks from using this?
@@borphos He definitely does proper planning. But if he sees too many APs, he always starts with yeeting a few. Gives the client confidence that they hired the right guy, if they see an immediate improvement.
@@LuisMan123yeah just choose a empty range
"You live in a windowless apartment with neighbours on all six sides" Well that's definitely the first time my specific living situation has been brought up in a UA-cam video 😂😂
It must be nice to have to walk past inside other people's houses to get in or out of yours. But who am I kidding? You never leave your house. Touching grass is for wimps.
Why do I have the feeling that warden doesn’t know about your phone? 😏
Why do I have the feeling that warden doesn’t know about your phone? 😏
Sounds grim
I work at a University. Back in the days before nearly every device being dual band, unconfirmed wireless printers killed 2.4 at certain spots in the dorms. When they are unconfigured they act as an AP. We could swap channels around a bit but you ran the risk of causing interference somewhere else, so the best thing to do was to have those students tell their neighbors to either configure their printers wifi, or turn it off and use a USB cable. Now we band steer to 5 and either turn the 2.4 radios way down, or leave them at normal power, but turn about half of them off. We also buy APs now that are dual band, but one of the radios is a soft radio that can be 2.4 or 5 and run about half of the APs in dual 5Ghz mode. We do this because, why waste a radio that can't help us on coverage if we can use it to add capacity. This effectively means that unless you have a very old or embedded device, we have nearly abandoned 2.4.
Band steering used to be somewhat problematic as it wasn't really a part of any standard, but they got it dialed in. As mentioned in the video WiFi 7, in trying to solve another problem, ended up with built in band steering. The other problem that the feature solves is that with so many challels in 6Ghz + 5Ghz, it was taking forever for your device to scan for APs. So now APs can announce that they have multiple radios and that they have neighboring APs. Theis effectively means that the AP is doing the scanning for the connecting device. It also helps devices transition to other APs more efficiently as they start to leave range, or if the AP they are on is congested. I'm looking forward to using 7 APs even if we don't get all tri-band APs because 7 allows us to use 2.4Ghz, and 5Ghz more effectively even if we don't have 6Ghz nearby. In high capacity areas 6Ghz will be really nice to have.
The best thing to ever happen to large scale wireless deployments is wifi planning and survey software like Hamina and ekahau. I highly reccomend using a planning tool, even for a personal deployment in an apartment. As mentioned in the video, don't rely on the APs to auto-pick a channel. Measure for a bit and select one yourself, or better yet, hav planning software make a channel plan. The free tools help a lot. While I don't use them professionally most of the time, I can confirm that everything I have used of ubiquiti's hardware and software (which is quite a lot) is excellent and is often appropriate in a professional setting. In an apartment, talking to your neighbors also helps a lot.
I thought wifi roaming standards before wifi 7 already made it possible to steer devices towards other radios/access points?
I'm no expert on this stuff but I also had the impression wifi 7 at last tries to solve many of the problems of wifi by default.
I remember sometimes seeing my university IT staff in 2013 going around the dorm hallways with scanners to triangulate which dorm had a printer blocking network access. And then fine that dorm.
My university just outright banned using printers over the university network, and requires you to use cables to use them
@borphos do you know any other planning Software which does not break the bank?
11:45 lowering your transmit power. I have been in IT for 25 years everytime I tell someone that they think I am crazy! I can't tell you how glad I am to hear you say this haha!
I manage wifi networks in MDU's. We often use the 'minimum' setting in AP's and still have plenty of neighboring accesspoints. Once I thought about disabling radio's but that would make life pretty hard for us. Luckily we don't have that many clients on them and the ruckus radio's switch pretty fast.
It’s common sense I would say. Use as much power as necessary and as little as possible. Then you can even put an AP into every room.
I'm using 20 WiFi routers in my bedroom to keep myself warm in the winter. Finally I can be the hamster in the microwave.
Would be more effective to use an 800 watt microwave magnetron imo. If the door was removed you could also use it to warm your hands or heat up a cup of coffee while also heating you form the inside out :D
you jest, but my ISP chooses the number of routers based on internet speed, not intended location. so in my 58sqm apartment i have a mesh network with 4 nodes just cause i wanted 600mbps.
@@iris4547 That's pretty stupid on their part. You can't unplug or turn off the other ones?
@@happinessiskey2858 yeah ive got 2 turned off, and the 2nd one is mostly just for extra ports.
Just yesterday watched the Tom Scott video damn, Baader-Meinhof working overtime to fw me lmao
0:25 I thought something slipped out
Thank you for a good chuckle, I needed that.
Lmaoooo
Linus only reserves that for when he gets hacked.
SAME
This video brought back some great Wi-Fi memories for me. Back in 2000, I was part of a team installing wireless ISP backbones in apartment complexes using the extremely new 802.11 (back then) Cisco routers. We would survey the buildings to determine antenna locations and types. One day we had some fun in the office testing how different materials affected the Wi-Fi signal. We found that the brick walls were nearly transparent, while glass and metal garage doors both destroyed the signal. We had also heard a rumor that pine needles would absorb the 2.4 GHz signals, because their length matched the 2.4 GHz wave height, so we tested those too. They definitely had an effect, which was helpful to know because as we transmitted from apartment building to apartment building, we often had to aim through pine trees. We also had to worry about the Fresnel effect, basically a radio wave is biggest at the halfway point between two antennas, so it's not like you could just use a spotting scope for a clear line of sight, not even with a Yagi antenna, you still had to worry about nearby large obstructions near the midpoint. I knew a lot about Wi-Fi 24 years ago, and all that info is basically worthless these days with modern Wi-Fi being nearly plug-n-play.
From our testing, brick will attenuate about 5-7dB off of your network signal while corrugated metal walls often see 10-30dB of attenuation depending on thickness, angle of metal, and material. Interesting that you mentioned glass, as that is between 2-3dB for uncoated single-pane glass (roughly the same as wood stud drywall construction without fire retardant coatings), but many of the glass reflective coatings will be in that 10+ range as well.
Very interesting about brick having no effect but glass and metal doing a number on the signal. The bit on pine needles is cool though. You reckon there's a specific tree out there that wholly coincidentally is terrible to pass wireless signals through? Thanks for your insight.
@@Brandon318 The glass we tested wasn't normal window glass, but rather glass walls typical in an office. We had nicknamed our office area the fishbowl, because we were surrounded by heavy glass walls and coworkers could watch us like the animals we were. Not sure of the exact thickness or coatings, but I'd say it was at around 1/2" thick, and tempered of course. So perhaps thickness has an impact. Tempering might be a factor too, since normal windows are not tempered. I'd be surprised if they were coated since they didn't even see sunlight, but the coatings might have just been standard fare from the vendor. Going from very old memories, I recall the office glass begin the worst material we tested, which shocked us since we expected it to be invisible. Very interesting that your testing revealed the impact of coatings, we never even thought about that.
@@professorcryogen6419 The pine needles thing was always one of those plausible rumors that I learned from a coworker. Personally, I kind of assumed that perhaps all trees & leaves block signals, and that pine needles weren't actually special. But we only tested fresh green pine needles, no other leaves, so I've always wondered. Your comment got me googling, and I found this excellent quote:
"According to Wireless Crash Course, by Paul Bedell, pine needles are organic material made up mostly of water. That means they are excellent at absorbing wireless signals known as RF Transmissions. In fact, the absorbing, or so-called “phasing” of RF signals, happens routinely around the 800 MHz frequency range. It just so happens that the length of a pine needle is equivalent to one-fourth the wavelength of a base station signal in the 800 MHz range."
I guess I was wrong about the pine needle being the same length as wavelength, but rather it's a quartet. Though not mentioned here, I'd also assume that pine needles radiating out in all directions is also a big factor, maximizing coverage. Pretty cool to finally know after all these years that this rumor was absolutely true.
@@professorcryogen6419 Actually, I always assumed this was more rumor than fact. Our limited testing didn't include any other vegetation, only pine needles, and I figured other trees might be just as bad. But your comment got me to researching, and after 24 years I now have my answer - check out this quote:
"According to Wireless Crash Course, by Paul Bedell, pine needles are organic material made up mostly of water. That means they are excellent at absorbing wireless signals known as RF Transmissions. In fact, the absorbing, or so-called “phasing” of RF signals, happens routinely around the 800 MHz frequency range. It just so happens that the length of a pine needle is equivalent to one-fourth the wavelength of a base station signal in the 800 MHz range."
Pretty cool that this rumor was totally true, at least for 800 MHz radio waves. But I'm not sure about Wi-Fi 2.4GHz, 5 GHz, and 6 GHz. Perhaps 2.4 GHz being a multiple of 800 MHz is a factor. We only had 802.11b 2.4 GHz radios to play with back then.
Non-tech people: "OMG! It is 2024, who uses cable anymore? We have wifi!"
Tech people: "What do you mean, my smart coffee maker doesn't have Ethernet port?"
Huh?
@@AlphaBlog1 Cables are a lot easier to deal with because physical signal separation is a lot easier. That way you don't have to deal with the WIFI headache depicted in the video.
@@jur4x I meant I didn't get the joke
@@AlphaBlog1 Tech guys like myself plug anything that has an Ethernet jack in, the joke is that we rather have ethernet and run cables then deal with WiFi
Extremely accurate 😂🫶🏻
That loop with Linus and Elijah walking in with boxes was pretty genius!
I work for a small Canadian ISP that supplies fibre to each and every individual dorm room at a local college. Each room has its own dedicated AP just for the one student's use that lives in it. We have to turn the 2.4GHz radios down to 10% power for the channel to be usable!
Another thing is setting the minimum data rate to 11 mbps, because it reduces the amount of spectrum that beacon frames take up. This is actually highly effective and overlooked
@@bcredeur97 This is also great on 5 GHz, but I usually set it at 20-25 Mbps. I also religiously use 20 MHz channel width on 5 GHz - unless there are no neighbours to speak of.
Yeah. In low bandwidth applications like healthcare, 20mhz channels are a must. Optimizing hospital wifi is an art and a science.
@@jrr851 It's just science.
@@HawoxX why 20mhz and not like 80 or 160mhz? just wondering
@@Auziuwu I might suggest that taking too much of bandwidth is waste of frequencies and might cause a lot of interference with other APs. So basically you should take as much bandwidth (20 or 40) as you actually need, and just widening it might worse the situation a lot
Had this problem setting up wifi for a school, we couldn't use less APs because at 30 clients per AP at each classroom we needed them, so the solution was to lower the output power. We managed 50 APs in a building with over 1500 clients. This was 2012
The classic random neighbour in one of the 178 apartments in the 26-story building who has an UniFi LR AP set to maximum power running on an overlapping band, a signal strong enough to be available half a block away from the building and even on the 2nd floor of the underground parking garage. Good times.
@@filipepmachado are they really that good?
@@p0358i only deployed a few unifi ap lite and their coverage is pretty damn impressive
Ah yes. I too connect all my wifi routers to tube amps. I mean, can you really call it a 'strong' wifi signal if it can't even microwave a chicken two floors down?
@@gleb.salmanov A good router and access point can become a great one with an empty can of Pringles, yet it fails to microwave anything, sadly, and one question remains unanswered: Will it blend?
@@filipepmachado this feels like a personal attack.
It's thanks to this that I have my WIFI working really well. Changing the channel has improved it massively.
3:07 very bold of you to assume this
i cant even explain how much i want to thank you. Im living in Germany, In an house up to 40 appartments, and each have theier own Wlan. I just switched to an cable router and tought why our Wlan was so extremly bad. Thank you very much
1:05 you know what I’d put in every room? A sweet custom Neon that says “Live, Laugh…” 😉
Liao
Launch
Liao
"live laugh liao"
Languish
Back when wireless was just getting popular in 2003, I would login to troublesome default wireless routers and change their channels to more vacant parts of the spectrum, usually Channel 1 or 11. They were usually setup to use Channel 6 by default. Now most access points use Channel 1. 😂
did you know? nintendo actually recommended that you use channel 1 or 11
@@gamecubeplayer adequate comment from someone named gamecubeplayer lol
FINALLY I understand why 10 years ago every day at 5pm straight all wifi based internet in my house would grind to a halt
Reminds me of the story I read of internet cut out at same 10am almost every day. Multiple ISP techs, equipment replaced...everything replaced still kept happening. Finally figured out it was the wireless link across the way...getting blocked by a delivery truck most mornings LOL
Your approach to simplifying complex tech topics is what keeps me coming back.
You're not supposed to tell the normies about different Wi-Fi channels because now none of us can have our own dedicated channel :(
Really like being shown what is happening behind the curtain for my everyday problems. When my video hitches, what might be happening under the hood. This kind if insight is one if the things I enjoy most about the channel.
8:05 absolutely awesome edit
I work in internet company in my country and we usually have single band router like tplink 2 antenna and users complain about speed issues on night time like 8pm usually we have tried dual band router to users who faces issue and the issue has been fixed sometime but some non techie ones don't want to change their stupid single band router
So this video helps them understand what we try to convince them
14:03 OCTO WHAT????
It's the thirteenth James Bond movie lol
Octopussy (:
Octopushy idk what yall heard
It's a movie...
it must be nice to be young
one of the most informative and best written / edited LTT videos ever
One thing to note is that in a lot of buildings in Europe you have ~20cm thick brick walls, and 2.4 GHz is the only way to get the signal to other rooms (and you cannot just drill a hole into a wall to get UTP cable to other rooms if you are renting the place)
I do lose a lot of speed at 5 mhz, but there still is 500 mbit available behind the thick concrete wall at 3m distance (1 gbit with cable)
2 rooms over i have 2/5 bars wifi on 2.4ghz
with 5ghz it would be 1 room wifi only
but hey atleast my neighbour cant shoot through my walls eh
However, that also means there are less interfering networks from your neighbours. In a large building (with 50 - 100 or even more apartments) made of reinforced concrete, which are common in my country, you would only see a few other networks, maybe 10 at most - certainly not dozens.
You can snake in a wire from the windows so that it isn’t too much of an eyesore(for the outside siding of the house, if it has one). But yeah, kinda annoying work but it’s worth it. I did this with three hardwired APs, one per floor and now have perfect 5ghz coverage on every corner on every floor of my house. It’s bliss.
You could get Powerline with WI-FI extenders in them. That way you can get 5 GHz and have Ethernet as well
At 4:08 Elijah is so well rendered. You can even see the lint on his t-shirt
2.4GHz wireless has been round longer than 802.11, we used WaveLan, its predecessor.
Microwave ovens ;-)
It's crazy how we underestimate the impact of Wi-Fi interference! Linus really nails it here. People often think the more access points, the better... like flooding every room with Wi-Fi is the solution. But if your access points are stuck on the same channels, you're not boosting coverage, you're creating traffic jams! It's like having more roads but forcing all the cars to drive on the same lane, total chaos. The lesson here? Smarter setups beat brute force every time. If only everyone around me would manage their Wi-Fi with even a fraction of this awareness, we’d all have smoother connections.
This is exactly why I went out of my way to get a (very expensive at the time) WiFi 6E router for my apartment. The 6 GHz traffic is basically entirely clear in my building so my Quest 3 game streaming is perfect.
It's been great to be up here... 6E didn't REALLY catch on in the consumer space, but 7 will... thankfully, they should all be LPI (low-power indoor) devices which have massive advantages (low tx power, forces STAs to tx even quieter) for the condo use case... so it won't be as bad as the other bands...
@@jeffcullen6573
Not familiar with WiFi 7 technology. Isn't low power indoor setting a technician side manual setting, not an automatic hardware protocol?
@@Un1234l LPI vs SP (Standard Power) is more of a WiFi on 6GHz thing -- not necessarily a WiFi 6E or 7 thing. What you'll see is most consumer routers as well as commercial access points intended for standard indoor use cases will be LPI-class devices.
Because of incumbent use in the 6GHz band, when we want to do anything more than LPI we have to use AFC - Automated Frequency Control. Read up on that... pretty wild!
As someone who has installed WiFi professionally and lives in a row house neighborhood where every house has got Fiber with a isp mandated router that had every AP pre-configured on channel 6, yes this completely kills wifi lol. I have a wi-spy too which is great be it a bit expensive for an average user :)
Signal strength is good, data rate is terrible. Even from just the beacon pings. I can see about 20-25 wifi AP's in my house.
You did a very good job in explaining all of this. What we really need is a higher speed/capacity at a lower frequency.
Another funny quirk you can run into with auto channel scanning is that if you have AP's that can scan daily/weekly, they often all scan simultaneously which can skew results significantly.
That was a fun one to discover.
You dropped this video LITERALLY as I received a bunch of Unifi APs this morning and currently provisioning them. At 13:20 what I actually did - I had my main AP in the center of the home be on "High" transmit power on 2.4ghz and "Medium" 5Ghz. The other 2 APs I set 2.4ghz to Low (both still need to reach outdoor cameras from a concrete house that my main center AP isnt getting a good signal to) and 5ghz aswell to "low". I have still MINOR interference from neighbors because in FL, they build homes very close to each other but its minor because all our houses are concrete
This is SO GREAT! I have always heard about wifi interference and how it affects thruput but this is the proof of concept to the extreme! I would love to see a ton of videos where you can test things like this.
I saw the door open with the APs started on 12:46 the labs team must be happy on this moment
Thank you Linus for this PSA. I didnt realize TX mattered so much until i checked how Hotel WiFi was setup. I noticed they had TX lowered to 18 db rather than my neighbors 28 db that flooded into our home.
Thanks for this little known tip. Unfortunately many consumer routers do not allow this function or hide it under the professional menu. Thx for the tips!!!
one problem ive heard about, just having 802.11b support enabled will cause beacon packets to use more of the airtime
advertising to 802.11b devices, requires transmitting the beacon at a lower bitrate, which means more time to transmit the packet
Yes. 100% this. It makes a huge difference.
Beacons are usually sent using lowest speed available, some APs allow to disable slower modulation and coding schemes. Has an added benefit of limiting transmission range too.
Yes, that's the reason I'm sticking to AC only.
Yes. Management frames are transmitted at the minimum supported rate. Go into your Wi-Fi settings and disable the slow ones. Nothing slower than 24 or 36 Mbps should be enabled.
Suburbian north Americans talking about wifi is always a treat. Living in a building that's in a building neighbourhood I get like 60 networks on my phone. I had two ubiquity APs that didn't cut it. Changed into an OP Asus and it's mostly fine now. At the cost of my neighbours stability, probably
9:05 legal wifi jammer? xD
This is a great video explaining wifi and interference.
However, you're in IT, you've setup a network using ubiquiti equipment and you didn't enable the simplest setting (that's lately enabled by default) that optimizes your network nightly ensuring you don't have the issues you have.
You can also enable band steering to push devices that support it, to use 5ghz.
why use band steering when you can just use ssid separation?
“Automatically selects the best channel on startup”
Wait, is that why restarting a router is such a commonly suggested (and surprisingly effective) solution for spotty internet troubles?
That can be part of it. But routers are like computers. They have a software and firmware. And with enough time, sometimes the software can have weird bugs or issues that get resolved with a simple reboot. most people don't usually reboot their routers nearly as often as they do with computers.
Some routers have the option for them to restart themselves at a specific time.
I recommend setting yours to restart at something like 2am
Most of the time it’s some kind of an issue with the router itself, like memory or firmware. Restarting takes care of all these potential issues in a single step and honestly it’s also the only way to take care of such issues, hence why it’s recommended to restart the network devices before anything else. Some routers even have an option to automatically reset once a day to avoid these issues.
@@guesswho2778 why would I want it to reset in the middle of my gaming sessions? Do you have any idea where you are, sir?
@@guesswho2778 you kidding me? that are peak traffic hours for youtube rabbit holes 😁
I’ve been in the enterprise Wi-Fi industry for about 7 years now, and deployed it at a partner for 9 years before that. Thank you for explaining this in a way that the average person can understand. Instead of trying to walk people through this, I’m going to start sending them this video.
I used to give presentations to a more technical audience. My go to was 5 reasons your WiFi sucks and how to fix it. I e often thought about turning that into a UA-cam video to help people. It goes more in details about airtime utilization, bss min rate, channel width and so much more. Designing Wi-Fi properly is an art form.
One tip I have for anyone reading comments. If you have a Mac you can get the program Wi-Fi explorer pro. It’s $20. You don’t get as much detail as the wispy, but You can see airtime utilization, channel width, and other really important stuff for a very low one time cost.
13:33 The power of ONE.. The power of TWO... The power of a word from our sponsorrrrr!
Glad you made a video on this. I spent quite a bit of time trying to solve signal drops and issues on VR trackers because there was too many wifi signals sitting on the same channels.
And this is also important when flying a drone, since you don't want to fly on a busy channel or at times at all if all channels are crowded.
This isn't that bad. (Well at least the first 3-4 experiments you did.) I live in a place with *VERY* old infrastructure alongside being the most densely populated area in my country.. Also my Wi-Fi dongle used to be a 10 year old oversized ASUS dongle. I used to have 1500-5000 ping in warzone. Download speed was 10 Mega *BITS* per second.
Also my internet provider (and basically all of the other choices I have since they give tons of information off to 3rd party companies resulting in constant crypto and casino ads.) is basically dogwater
I'm officially a LTT fanboy now. 28 seconds ago.
1 minute for me
good job
Lmao same
3 min
Lmao a bot just copied you
Or are you a bot?
another thing to keep in mind if your router supports wider bandwidths (to increase speeds in theory) on both 2.4g/5g sometimes you might NOT want to use a wider bus to prevent overlapping on used channels.
i can get much stabler, and faster speeds while using a narrower band, to prevent going into same channels as my neighbours are using.
7:07 dodo 😂😂😂😂😂
@@dirtbikeboy8680 I said HaHa doo Doo and then I saw this immediately after
Beat me to it 😅
i just used wifiman to adjust my wifi channel and width and it works great. this video is greatly appreciated.
"Look at all that WAP" 😅
Need a bucket and a mop for this Wireless Access Point
Okay Nicki.
I remember all the Wireless Access Point memes that came out of Nicki releasing that song. 😂
This is crazy! We had WiFi cameras in our barn and we couldn’t figure out why all of them would not work. 6 out of 8 would work, I tried bigger antennas, putting the cameras closer together, which made it worse. This explains it. Too much interference. Thank you
@7:22 "a couple of dozen" ..... I do not live in an apartment (1930's in between house with no insulation at all) but a decade or so ago a sensitive wifi-adapter picked up over 200(!) networks while standing inside. Not sure how many were guest networks, if that was a thing back then, but still, that's quite a bit more.
@@TheSkcube I watched it, was just pointing out you don't need an appartment building filled with AP's to get lot's of "noisy neighbours".
@@bartgrefte whoops, it seems like I replied to the wrong comment, my apologies.
@@TheSkcube ah, no worries :)
Hi Linus! I'm a big fan of your work! One thing that should be considered is that the presence of a wifi network does not cause as much interference when it's not transmitting data. The "real" interference may occur when there are many wifi networks really sending and receiving data at the same time.
3:13 "you don't know me"
When I used to live in a student housing, every single Studio (~15 m² each with dozens per floor) had their own Router, all the exact same model in the exact same channel. After hearing my friends complaining many times about the slow wi-fi, I changed mine to channel 1, theirs to channel 6 and everyone else in the building was still in channel 11.
5x times the initial speed, but the best change was in stability
One of the best things I ever did was totally reconfigure my network *the second* the tech hooking it up initially had left the house. Between reconfiguring the network names and passwords and setting the channel and broadcast power settings I was able to go a whole 2 years before I even wanted to buy my own networking gear to replace it.
Those techs will set it up so basic they follow a guid. I usually buy my own router and WAPs and configure it all myself for my living conditions.
@@ryans413 I've been locked in to ISP provided routers for far too long, but my 'landline' phone has run off them since maybe around 2008.
Buying and configuring a router to do the same telephony is non-trivial.
I recently noticed our 2.4GHz wasn't performing very well, and lo and behold, auto somehow chose an overlapping channel, and it's now comfortably sitting in channel 11, where it works a bit better.
Sadly, all channels have stuff going on near my apartment, but channel 11 is the one where the least stuff is going on and where the other routers I see have the least signal strength
People have been telling me WiFi will replace all cabled networking any time soon for the last 10 years. Happy to see the laws of physics still apply in 2024 :D
the day that wifi replaces all cabled networking is the day that i quit my job and become amish
@@curatedmemes9406 big same
As someone who works Tech Support for a local ISP, I am mandating this video be watched by every customer before they call in.
What was that at 13:38
It's what happens when you exceed leet.
11:59 the thing is you can put all the smart home devices on one channel because they really do not get bogged down due to the low amount of data being sent to those devices. so it would not be a problem if they were all just smart home devices.
Linus sneaking in the Parsec 5:47 video platform to help us degooglify while bypassing the UA-cam guidelines
Pointing it out in case others find this. Rogers has disabled manual channel adjustments on their Hitron routers
Yall need to make a series explaining everything wifi and networking for us.
My Internet box has factory option menus to select 2,4 GHz, 5 GHz or both. It also shows the spectrum and all the WiFi routers close to yours, so you can clearly select the best channels to use.
Also, don't forget that if you use a higher channel number, you'll slightly increase your B/W (because carrier frequency also increases a bit, so the modulation allows more space for data).
Totally underrated.
If you ever do a WiFi scan in the financial districts in SF or NY you would be stunned.
We counted 205 2.4mHz (edit GHz) APs within range of one location. I was surprised they could even stay connected to their own network. Speed was slow.
**2.4GHz or 2400MHz.
@@DaleEarnhardtsSeatbeltdoh... yep
@@avnut5517 I got you!
Honestly appreciate the visual representation of the scenarios, makes it incredibly easy to understand! :)
Automatic channel selection is often completely boneheaded and a lot of the advice you see online (just use channels, 1, 6, and 11 and it will fix everything) is aimed at businesses with many access points, not individuals in a congested area with only one or two. If 1 6 and 11 are all heavily used by devices you have no control over, it can actually be better to choose an in between channel and accept the signal noise than to try to cram your router in amongst all the others on one of the non overlapping channels. As long as your router is the closest (and therefore loudest), the noise won't be a significant problem and you'll get a comparatively open "highway".
It's not about noise for using 2,3,4,5,7,8,9,10, it's about the fact that any data sent over either the designated channel or overlapping channel registering -85dBm RSSI or higher will trigger a retry instead of a transmit. So instead of impacting just one channel, you're now impacting two.
@@Brandon318 Can you explain what that means?
@@julius9727you're congesting two other channels instead just one. Its like driving in the middle of two lanes on the highway
@@julius9727 When a device on a wireless network detects a signal over a certain threshold of signal strength on the same or overlapping channels, it will pause any transmissions for a randomly determined amount of time before attempting to transmit again to avoid interfering with an active transmission. Because the threshold to halt transmission is quite a bit lower than useable WiFi, it's quite possible that wireless networks you can't even see on a network selection screen as well as other 2.4GHz or 5.0GHz devices (bluetooth, wireless peripherals, etc) will impact the network.
@@Brandon318 But that's only meaningful if you control the other two channels. If all the available non-overlapping channels are so congested you can't make meaningful use of them -- which is very common in 2.4 in urban areas -- you'll have better luck trying an intermediate channel in the hopes that the noise floor is low enough to not trigger (freqent) retries. Which network admins aren't used to thinking about, because they're used to controlling the entire network space, not being forced into a situation where there are no good non-overlapping options.
And, yes, it is about noise, traffic negotiation only happens within a channel, between two different channels all other signals are noise.
Great job guys... you did a very good job at depicting some common issues with Wi-Fi. Always best to use wired when possible for security, privacy, performance, reliability and sometimes cost. Wi-Fi not only doesn't reach it's advertised speeds in non-ideal conditions, and not only interferes with other APs and devices but also loses a good chunk of it's packets in the layer - there's another layer of error checking beyond TCP with Wi-Fi and it causes increased latency waiting for those packets to go through. Wireless anything is far worse for security and privacy as well. MU-MIMO doesn't solve all of the congestion issues, either.
What about MESH wifi?
@@insanecoolaid7299 personal, non scientific opinion: WiFi Meshing is bad and should not be your first, second, third or even your fourth choice. Pseudo scientific rationale: the same fundamental physics being explored by discount Eminem (love u Linus pls don't shadow ban me) apply to mesh WiFi too. They're just more wireless devices, but they can get very loud.
Was a tad surprised with how experienced (or maybe not) Linus is, that he would set all his AP's in house to the same auto defaulting channel. One of the first things you want to do in a multi AP setup is to tune the channels (both 2.4GHz, 5GHz and 6GHz) and transmission strength of each AP in a system. Also setting a minimum RSSI per AP can also be useful at times.
I own a townhouse and have a high density apartment complex right out my front door. I can see 50+ APs any given moment.
Why don’t AP vendors add a feature in firmware to automatically dial back their transmit power in congested environments?
Newer stuff has that. But it's not turn on be default
Because turning down the TX power in a congested area hurts the performance of the AP that's turned down - it only works if everyone agrees to do it. No brand wants to take the initiative on that since it'll make the out of the box user experience for anyone who buys it worse
Thank you so much for mentioning overlapping channels and the "safe" channels of 1, 6, and 11. Not enough people know about this, even in the IT field.
I didn't know that riley had Dandruff @13:43
His hair looks perfectly clean
@@Artemis-v8i that sweatshirt Tho 😅
So you're simulating the typical apartment complex. Thanks. I've struggled with crappy WiFi in every apartment building I've lived in because there's always 40-60 different WiFI SSIDs around me and my bandwidth drops to under 1Mbps whehn I leave the room wher the router is.
This is similar to what happens to cellular connections rural areas with high congestion. I frequent Glamis, California, which is a giant sandbox in the middle of nowhere. During non holiday weekends the service tends to be decent and a bit spotty at times. But on a holiday weekend where there can be 25,000 people and up, service becomes nonexistent.
I used to visit family in a remote location. Needed a Phone booster just to get any real signal. Up till about 10-11pm speeds were slow. But after that it was actually usable at like 7-8Mb DN. Talked em into Starlink and it's been great for probably 3yrs now
I literally came to the same realization with my wifi setup. Had 3 nest wifi pros setup in my 2800 sqft home and would always get random disconnections. Disconnected 1 router and moved another to a more open area in the house. And now my wifi is 10x better
12:26 ? It's not WIFI 7 specific feature.
I love this video. Hope there is a yt shorts for people kids, grandparents and for the technically challenged people. This kind of video is a game changer for them, "IF" they watch this until the end "AND" if they understood each point.
I'm a bit disappointed you didn't touch up on
- utilizing minimum data rate control
- enforcing said data rate control
If you don't mind limiting compatiblity with old devices then
- disabling CCK data rates (1/2/5.5/11Mbps)
Or if forcing higher minimum data rates causes older devices to have a hard time connecting (Edit: Though this kind of defeats the purpose of the higher minimum data rates)
- Send beacons at 1Mbps/6Mbps
These are essential knobs to twiddle when dealing with high-density installations.
With the bone stock settings, it's no wonder things crawl to a halt even with just half a dozen AP's talking over each other (slowly).
^-------THIS GUY dot elevens
The editing in this video was super good! Props for whoever did it or I approve of the new style! It really felt different and punchier and catchier without feeling like "hey kids look at us being all SILLY!1!"
Dont forget
Printer that use, wifi direct, that broadcast its own wifi
Even connected to a wifi network
Let the beauty of what you love be what you do.
Remember the days of unsecure wifi? Sometimes you could "IT" an entire apartment building without residents knowing. Did this more than once. Changing channels and transmit power.
#whitehat
More like grayhat since it's technically unauthorized access even though it's for the greater good
I was having this exact problem with my 2.4GHz wifi between my main router and access point. Turned off the access point one, made sure the 5.0GHz were on separate bands and now I'm all set. Thanks!
4:08 what app would that be
@@Mininukefromfallout there are a few. Search for WiFi analyzed.
The one from AVM just called "wi-fi" is pretty good for a lot of use-case.
As a Radio Controlled airplane enthusiast I can without a doubt say that 2.5Ghz travels through buildings. As a responsible pilot I regularly monitor the frame losses (and occasional holds). We fly close to an industrial center. As the employees start going to work we start seeing frame frame losses escalate.
4:38 why tf is my cursor moving on its own
I'm literally listening to this video on the aftershockz. They are my daily drivers. Sometimes my wife's like "what are you listening to" and it's nothing because I forgot they are on. So super comfortable. Also if you struggle with ear buds due to claustrophobia or sweaty ears these bypass all that.
And this is why my ESP8266 modules stopped working. I have to use an ESP32 with a big antenna or take it to the park.
now i have a question... how many ESP's i have to bring into 150+ people lecture hall to ruin the day for everybody :D
I don'f fully get why though, can you elaborate on the reason again for me? I have connectivity issues with my ESP32s at home too (small flat, 1 central 2.4 WiFi router, not many neighbours). Adding a separate AP in literally the NEXT room (10m distance and 1 wall in between to the main AP) actually improved these problems.
@@justus9694 All of my ESP8266 with WLED on AP mode or connected to wifi will not connect but the ESP32 works.
@@4bSix86f61 okay, they probably have improved WiFi on the ESP32 over the 8266. Still it's not as stable or capable of longer distances as I'm used to from devices like smartphones or notebooks
Linus you could use a wlc in your home. Even if you don't want to pay for it you could just do static setting for AP 's. As an example look for interferance in your home for 2.4Ghz and turn off some of the AP's 2.4Ghz. As an another example you could just change the beacon, eirp stuff (I know those are waaay too detailed but if you think about it, makes sense bc you could set it once and it will always work on the ideal point).
14:52 hilarious
"video uploaded 7 minutes ago".
@@NineEyeRon I watched at 10x speed
On top of the mentioned auto setting downside, there are some specific problems if left unchecked. The channel usage at the spot your router is at might be different than it is on the edges of its reach. We had such a situation where the auto set channel was mostly clear near the router, but on the other side of the apartment that channel was used by 6 different other wifis. Thankfully using the phone app revealed this and I could set it up manually.
Also good tip on the reduced strength!
Glad to see a video using the RF test chamber! I've been waiting for one of these!
One good feature of the UDM Pro (And, I think most Unifi controllers), is that it will scan the wifi environment around it and automatically pick a channel that isn't saturated.