router (7800n) or line fault?

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muttyhc
Posts: 6
Joined: Fri Mar 13, 2015 8:46 pm

router (7800n) or line fault?

Post by muttyhc »

Dear all,
First post here but wanted to get an idea of what I'm dealing with problem wise.

I swapped over from VM to TalkTalk recently,

Bought a second hand 7800n on eBay as I heard it was a fantastic router, I have had it going tonight and it doesn't seem to have been any better than the router talktalk provided so far (which was horrid).

Basically we were watching a few streams I believe, youtube upstairs and iplayer down and the router seemed to stop working after a point, wifi went and was gone for a minute or two before returning and being extremely slow.

This happened regularly! with the talktalk router but has happened once so far with the billion.

I have been playing around with settings since trying to get it stable again,

I am currently on 11N with no snr tweak.

My line is usually between 7-8mb and was this with the talktalk router too.

It is a long line, approx 3 km from the exchange.

I don't hear any crackling or noise on the line, I have a splitter on the bt box too.

Did my streams overload the line? is it a router issue? wifi issue? Don't really know where to begin to be honest!

Thanks for any help.
Tomken
Posts: 467
Joined: Tue Jul 26, 2011 10:31 am
Location: Co Durham

Re: router (7800n) or line fault?

Post by Tomken »

It's possible you could have been maxing out the bandwidth but when iPlayer doesn't have sufficient (min 3.7meg for HD streaming), it begins to buffer first.

It could also have been a wireless problem, but to eliminate that to diagnose a line problem, both machines ( I assume you are just talking about two ?) would need to be wired to the router.

WiFi can be disrupted by a number of things, favourite seems to be a cordless phone base too near the router but these are some other causes -

http://www.kitz.co.uk/adsl/rein.htm

Distance from the router for each machine is also significant as signal strength is relative to the distance which will reduce the throughput, but one dropping out would not affect another machine closer to the router.

Another can be because of interference from other local users with similar signal strengths on or adjacent to the channel your router is broadcasting on.

Open a command prompt on each machine and enter netsh wlan show networks mode=bssid

This will display your SSID as well as any other local users, the channels they are broadcasting on and their respective signal strengths expressed as a %.

Any on or adjacent to yours >50% can cause you problems and you will need to log into the router to change to another channel where their signal strengths are <=50% and one that may increase the signal strengths of your own machines.

Choosing the least populated channel will also help regardless of other users signal strengths as collectively, they could still cause you problems.
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