What could be blocking wireless signal?

I recently moved to a new student house I have no problems connecting with my laptop anywhere in the house but my housemate has a laptop with a usb dongle as its old but the dongle is an expensive TP link one.

She can only get a weak signal putting the dongle under her door and outside her room and even then its slow.

I had my desktop in the living room with the router and it always gets 5 bars(as it would)

The problems with me occured as I took my desktop to my bedroom since that is where my plasma is and then at first it picked up no signal, then if I put aerial on the floor it got 3 bars against my bed but refused to connect, and against the wall pretty much directly above router it had a 3 bar signal, refused to connect first time but on second attempt connected but only locally

I am using an O2 Wireless box 3 but used to use a Wireless box 2 for first few days borrowed from a friend so cannot tell if its the router however my housemate had problems with the wireless box 2 the same as the new one.

Plasterboard walls with foil lining

Have you tried changing the channel on your router? It's possible that you are using the came channel as a neighbour and they are conflicting.

Also, AV Senders or DECT phones can also cause interference. You could download Network Stumbler to help identify the problem.

Any walls, foil-lined plasterboard, electronic devices, etc. between her dongle aerial and the router aerial could be the problem. Have you tried her laptop in the same locations as you get good signals? If hers is still bad then it's down to her laptop/dongle.

If the real problem is slowness rather than signal strength try running the freeware TCPOptimizer on her laptop if it's Windows XP based. http://www.speedguide.net/downloads.php

In reply to a post by Anonymous:

Have you tried changing the channel on your router? It's possible that you are using the came channel as a neighbour and they are conflicting.

Oh, not this old chestnut again ! Wi-fi is a time-shared service, so several users can use the same channel without any problems. That's why hotels use it.

In reply to a post by Anonymous:

Also, AV Senders or DECT phones can also cause interference. You could download Network Stumbler to help identify the problem.

Wrong again. DECT phones use 1.8GHz, so will NOT interfere with 2.4GHz wi-fi.

"Wi-fi is a time-shared service, so several users can use the same channel without any problems."

True, but there comes a point when there are possibly so many on a channel that the time sharing may be swamped.

Wrong again. DECT phones use 1.8GHz, so will NOT interfere with 2.4GHz wi-fi.

Indeed, should have said "analogue".

several users can use the same channel from the same device, but what is the impact of two devices on the same channel at the same location ?

Is her dongle rated b or g?

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

"Wi-fi is a time-shared service, so several users can use the same channel without any problems."

True, but there comes a point when there are possibly so many on a channel that the time sharing may be swamped.

That's true of any shared connection. Even wired ethernet can be swamped at a certain point.

Edited by deleted (Sun 27-Sep-09 08:21:39)