Wifi reception

I've been running a wifi network for my home for just under a year on channel 13. Its been great, runs without a hitch on all systems that use it.

However within the past two weeks I've been experiencing packetloss in the region of 80% on all wireless devices. The internet is completely unusable using my wifi connection now.

I've installed NetStumbler and nothing is on or near my channel. I even reset my router and put it on another blank channel (4) to no effect. There have been no electronic changes to my setup recently. The packetloss even remains with the laptop sitting on top of the router. so I am at a loss as to what it could be.

There are new neighbours either side of my house, but what could be so strong as to cause such cross channel interference?

I want my wifi back

Maybe a wireless video sender, or something else using 2.4GHz ?

I had a customer with exactly this problem caused by an AV sender.

Thanks for the suggestions guys. Unfortunately I don't think an AV was the problem.

It had got to the stage where my systems were failing to even acquire an IP address. I changed security to WPA mode and upped the firmware to the latest release. Seemed to work.

After a bit of faffing with security, I switched back to WEP mode (have to, I have a station which doesn't support WPA) and it seems to be fine with no packetloss.

The strange thing is, the settings are exactly as they were before apart from a different WEP key.

you also installed the latest firmware which can often make a difference too

Well it didn't at first. I had to redo security (back into the same config) before it worked.

This is very unusual. AV senders will usually only cause a problem when the WiFi signals are very weak. Although AV senders put out the same amount of power as WiFi - the bandwidth of the AV signal is much wider, so the power gets spead over a wider area. A WiFi signal which has all its power confined to a small bandwidth will normally win out over an AV sender.