Serious Network Issues

[designgeek]

Hey guys, I'm having some serious problems with my network. First and foremost, my signal quality is suddenly terrible. I'm sitting right next to my dual band time capsule and I'm defaulting to 2.4 GHz channel 9 with a transmit rate of 52. It fluctuates as low as 5 and as high as 117. On that band I should be getting theoretical throughput of 130, not to mention that I should be on 5GHz with a throughput of near 300... I've even set the 5GHz network name and it doesn't even show up when I'm looking for a network. My roommates are having the same issues as me so I'm sure it's not a problem with my machine. I sometimes get a stronger signal from my 5GHz AEBS on the other side of my house.

I have the TC on channels 149 and 9, the AEBS on 157, and an Airport express on channel 3 extending 2.4 in my livingroom. Is there a problem with this? I don't have any of them using wide channels,and I tried to pick channels that aren't close to each other.

Also, occasionally, randomly it seems, one of my roommates playing Starcraft will have massive lag. I check my console and all it says is that during those times there were UDP requests that were blocked by stealth mode on the ports around 40000-63000 from Open DNS (208.67.220.220). I'm thinking it's just our internet connection but I'm not sure. Is there any way I can prioritize that traffic so there is no lag?

Please help, I'm completely stumped, I've reset everything and the TC still won't work.

 

[Les Kern]

Well, it's really hard to say. could be interference, a faulty ap, a neighbor with a nuclear reactor... virtually anything.

the way I'd handle this is to make as simple a system as possible first. try wired only... turn off the ap's. see any other local signal?
then add wireless from the router and test, keeping the TC out of the equation, checking everything as you go a long... for hours, not minutes.

perhaps I am not much help? But that's how I'd look at it. And at least it's reproducible.

 

[designgeek]

Well, it's really hard to say. could be interference, a faulty ap, a neighbor with a nuclear reactor... virtually anything.

the way I'd handle this is to make as simple a system as possible first. try wired only... turn off the ap's. see any other local signal?
then add wireless from the router and test, keeping the TC out of the equation, checking everything as you go a long... for hours, not minutes.

perhaps I am not much help? But that's how I'd look at it. And at least it's reproducible.

Thank you for your help, I'm going to keep this on file for the next inevitable issue. I just last night tried giving them a rest, It seems to work, but I just don't think these things should need to take a nap every few weeks. They were all down for about 15 minutes and then I brought them all back up. Things seem to be working fine, I'm not ruling out interference, since my signal is stronger but still fairly inconsistent. I'm getting around 200mbit throughput sitting next to my TC when I should be getting at least 270. Occasionally it will drop to 80 for a moment but then back up.

As far as the latency issue, my ISP Time Warner isn't the greatest around here. I've heard lots of complaints from friends of mine about inconsistent service, granted that traffic in this town comes in huge waves due to the local college, a town of <30,000 shouldn't have service issues.