Wireless connection roaming between access points

08
2013-08
  • Saulius Valatka

    I live in 15 story student accommodation building that only provides wireless internet. My laptop has a built in "Intel(R) WiFi Link 5100 AGN" wireless adapter. I've been observing the following pattern when connecting to the college wireless network:

    • Connect successfully, the network icon in the system tray shows like 2/5 bars for the signal strength. All is working well, speed is like ~2MB/s, skype video calls work flawlessly.
    • About 10 minutes pass and the signal strength seems to get better, eventually it reaches 5/5 bars in the system tray. However the connection speed starts dropping exponentially to like ~200 kB/s or less, it becomes very unstable, skype video is virtually not working and keeps disconnecting every few minutes.
    • I reconnect to the network manually, everything works very well again, strength 2/5, the pattern repeats itself.

    My guess is that my network card decides to switch access points after sometime, since it discovers a better signal, but that signal turns out to be worse for some reason. I verified this in part by changing my wifi adapter setting of "roaming aggressiveness" to the weakest. Now the signal stays at 2/5 for a half an hour or more, but eventually it still reaches 5/5 and I have to reset the connection manually. I also noticed that my android phone does not seem to have this problem, it connects to a weak signal, stays with it and works very nice.

    So my question is: is it possible to somehow observe the access point migration, i.e. confirm my suspicion and if this is indeed the case, is it possible to force my adapter to work with a specific access point ?

    • Answers
  • kobaltz

    Have you tried scanning around and looking to see if the wireless network that you're using us sharing the same channels as many others. You are probably using the same channel as many other networks which is causing the interruptions as well as slow speeds.

    http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/21132/change-your-wi-fi-router-channel-to-optimize-your-wireless-signal/

    Check out the link above as I believe (hopefully) this will help you out.


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    Managing a wireless internet connection
  • cornjuliox

    I've just recently purchased a USB wi-fi adapter and have been using the software (for Windows XP) that comes with it to search for and connect to networks, but it's really quite slow and featureless. Are there free/OSS alternatives for Windows XP that can I can replace it with? Preferably something that can, in addition to connecting/searching for wireless networks, display stats like signal strength and transfer speeds on graphs so I can better monitor the quality of my connection?


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  • 8088

    Ekahau HeatMapper is a free software tool for quick and easy coverage mapping of Wi-Fi (802.11) networks. It's the only free, easy-to-use tool that shows, on a map, the wireless network coverage in your home or small office. HeatMapper also locates all access points.

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    i prefer the Windows connection manager, however, the weakness of you signal is hardly software related, some WLAN adapter are just poor performers, not much you can do about.