I’ve been installing a network at the new office. It worked when I first got it going at 3am in the morning, but when I came back around noon, every computer was really lagging whenever making a request anywhere on the network. To be clear, this was not necessarily an internet problem – it was happening on the LAN too.
So I spoke to my friends at TBS Automations – they suspected that my router was sharing the same channel as another router in the area. To determine if that was really the case, they had me download an Android app called “Wi-fi Analytics”.
The app shows a bunch of information about each network in the area. The two pieces of info that I cared about are:
- dBM number: A negative number closer to 0 is the best strength. Anything under -60 dBm is weak.
- Channel number: 2.4 Ghz has channels 1-11 or so and 5 Ghz has maybe a half-dozen or so like 41, 44, 130, etc.
For me, my channel number was 3. My two neighbor’s were on channel 3 and channel 9. The dBm on all three were between -60 and 0. This was the proof that we sought.
As a result, I went into my router and changed the channel to 6 (the furtherest away from 3 and 9). That did the trick – all requests on the network were going a lot more smooth.