Wi-Fi Interference in Congested Office Environments
If you’re in an office suite environment with lots of other tenants nearby, your Wi-Fi is likely to be spotty at best. You have location-specific issues here that don’t happen at home or other locations, where Wi-Fi is less dense and more spread out (unless you’re in a big apartment building).
Why is Wi-Fi bad in office environments?
You’ll be bombarded by everybody else’s Wi-Fi, microwaves, cordless phones, and everything else that emits a signal from above, below, and from all sides, making your Wi-Fi a miserable experience.
There’s not much you can do about it, because you can’t control everybody else’s Wi-Fi unless you want to have a contractor come in and shield your entire suite from electro-magnetic interference from the outside.
Probably not going to happen.
But it didn’t used to be this way? Maybe I need a new Wi-Fi router?
Maybe, maybe not. If you’re running a realy old router, or it’s a cheap or defective router, then a new router may help. Getting a different Wi-Fi technology or equipment that operates on a different frequency can sometimes help. Keep in mind, your Wi-Fi environment is always changing, and this may turn out to be only a temporary fix.
The reality is, most your neighbors probably didn’t have Wi-Fi routers and other interference producing equipment in the past.
Now they do! Welcome to your new Wi-Fi reality.
So what do I do?
You’re not going to want to hear this, but the best thing you can do is to WIRE your equipment. Good old fashioned tried and true CAT5 networking.
If you’ve got fixed equipment (think desktop computers, servers, network printers, or anything else that connects to the Internet) that doesn’t move around, your best bet is to not use Wi-Fi at all.
Plug it in and be done with it.
CAT5 is not susceptible to the same interference and congestion issues that Wi-Fi is inherently susceptible to. If the cables are good, and it’s plugged in, it just works.
Yeah, you have to have somebody come out to run cables wherever you need to connect things and that costs money.
So does buying new Wi-Fi equipment all the time, buying more Wi-Fi equipment, buying repeaters and boosters, buying computers with newer better Wi-Fi technology, dealing with drops and poor speed, figuring out why your computer(s) are connecting to your neighbor’s Wi-Fi preventing you from accessing your own resources, and on and on and on….
Do it once and be done with it. Then you can laugh at everybody else you know that has Wi-Fi issues, because that’s not your problem anymore.
Do you HAVE to have Wi-Fi, like in the case of an iPad or some other device that doesn’t have the ability to be hard wired, or it’s just not practical to do so? Then you’ll have to use Wi-Fi on those devices, and just deal with the issues before you on that device. At least you can get the other systems and equipment off Wi-Fi and using a more reliable and stable way of connecting.
This is an excellent article on Wi-Fi interference from Network World.