Wifi interference

Just experienced wifi interference and its consequences. I have two routers downstairs, a Zyxel VMG-1312-B10A and a talk talk business router. Both have wifi on on the 2.4ghz band. The Zyxel is set to channel 3 - 20mhz width. The talk talk router picks whatever channel it feels like despite me picking channel 6 it changes at a whim about every day or so.

I monitor the zyxel which is in bridge mode via the wifi on an upstairs PC with DSL stats. Tonight around midnight DSL Stats couldn't log in to the zyxel to collect stats for about an hour until I began to investigate.

Firing up WinFi Lite I discovered that the talk talk router was also on channel 3 and winfi lite was highlighting the two in red. Aha I thought that must mean the two are interfering with each other, and I knew it was me because I was wearing my glasses.

So moral of the story I have switched off the talk talk routers 2.4ghz signal and now DSL Stats is happily logging in to the weaker zyxel signal. Phew, so much for my ad-hoc mesh network.

Edited by Banger (Tue 29-Dec-20 02:30:47)

This is the one thing I think may happen if I go for Zzoomm as they are going to have two hubs, Adtran SmartRG 400, so if they are both putting out wi-fi, I am sure they will cause some problems, saying that I could disable the one, Wi-fi is good from my Zyxel router all around the house from where it is in the living room.

i use Ethernet a lot here anyway, it is only the Echo dots, phone, and my Switch bots that uses Wi-fi

It's highly recommended that you only use channels 1, 6 and 11.
Other channels overlap and cause more interference than non overlapping channels.
The channel you use overlaps with 1 and 6 causing more interference than if you were using channel 1 or 6.

In reply to a post by Banger:

Phew, so much for my ad-hoc mesh network.

As you've found, having two independent devices that don't share information, is not a mesh. (There is a thread on how meshes work in the other forum). That TalkTalk router sounds a problem if it doesn't stay on the channel you choose.

The advice to only use the 3 central channels is not wrong for performance, but with 2.4 GHz range being so far, in many towns there are no spare channels. In my street 2.4 GHz is unable, and I'm using 5GHz because of its reduced range.

In reply to a post by danielhyde:

It's highly recommended that you only use channels 1, 6 and 11.
Other channels overlap and cause more interference than non overlapping channels.
The channel you use overlaps with 1 and 6 causing more interference than if you were using channel 1 or 6.

I've checked the Zyxel and it says channel 1 but the carrier is actually on channel 3 according to winfi lite.

Have a read here
https://www.metageek.com/training/resources/why-chan...

If the talktalk router isn’t playing ball, get it replaced under your contract with them. The new hub only chooses 1,6,11 on AUTO so it’s odd you say it chose channel 3. It wouldn’t do that. Unless you have an older model, some of those were made by huawei and were programmed poorly.

I think it is a firmware problem with the hub and TTB have "no channels back to sagemcom to report firmware problems" according to a rep. Anyway I have just switched off 2.4 that seems to be sticking. I have another 2 hubs after a cockup with the order but they have the same firmware.

The device is fully managed via TR069 and does receive firmware updates as required. In terms of having nobody they can work with at sagecomm, how do you think they got the thing going in the first place? A stakeholder in the company...

What specific firmware problems do you have as there isn’t widely reported devices with this hub anywhere.

There are a couple of things. One on the ethernet display it doesn't show link rate, same for the WAN. But the main problem is when you manually select a wifi channel on 2.4 or 5ghz after a day or so it changes. In other words it is in auto mode despite choosing the required channel.

Post deleted by seb