I have had a really strange wireless issue the past few days. I've been struggling with my wireless setup forever, so this is just another knot in the string.
The main base station is a Time Capsule, maybe 6 months old. It's on the bottom floor of a three-floor townhome (new construction, so nice thin crappy walls, etc). Obviously, with the Time Capsule's not-so-stellar range, I added an Airport Express to act as a repeater on the middle floor. I could never get a good signal upstairs, and my speeds were horrible (22mbps downstairs, 3 mbps upstairs on average). This lasted for months. So, on a hunch, I unplugged the Express. Suddenly I actually did get speeds up to about 8-10 mbps. Straight from the Time Capsule...maybe it wasn't so bad afterall!
This lasted for about 4-5 days. Then suddenly, one day in the middle of browsing, my wireless dropped out completely...nothing at all. And since then, it's been extremely intermittent. Like, I can barely get anything while sitting at my desk, but if I move 5' over to the couch in my office, it seems OK. And if I walk out into the hallway outside my office, it's perfectly fine (10 feet away).
I've attached an image of the signal graph generated by the Time Capsule. The yellow line is another AirTunes-only Airport Express on the middle floor, and the dark line is a TiVo on the third floor in the bedroom across the hall from my office. The green line is my laptop. the graph starts from me standing in the hall outside my office and drops down when I walk to my desk. Interesting how the other two are perfectly straight signal lines, and my laptop is all over the place.
What makes this even weirder is that all of the 20 or so wireless networks I can usually see from my office also disappear whenever I lose my connection. This leads me to believe that maybe something is wrong with the airport card on my laptop...or it's some weird software glitch.
I have planned for a while on wiring my office anyway, as I just cannot seem to get a successful wireless network here...so in the end, it may not matter that much...but still any idea what would cause a working wireless network to suddenly blank out and stop working in the middle of the day and never work correctly again? And no, I didn't add any devices...no phones, no microwaves, no satellites...
The main base station is a Time Capsule, maybe 6 months old. It's on the bottom floor of a three-floor townhome (new construction, so nice thin crappy walls, etc). Obviously, with the Time Capsule's not-so-stellar range, I added an Airport Express to act as a repeater on the middle floor. I could never get a good signal upstairs, and my speeds were horrible (22mbps downstairs, 3 mbps upstairs on average). This lasted for months. So, on a hunch, I unplugged the Express. Suddenly I actually did get speeds up to about 8-10 mbps. Straight from the Time Capsule...maybe it wasn't so bad afterall!
This lasted for about 4-5 days. Then suddenly, one day in the middle of browsing, my wireless dropped out completely...nothing at all. And since then, it's been extremely intermittent. Like, I can barely get anything while sitting at my desk, but if I move 5' over to the couch in my office, it seems OK. And if I walk out into the hallway outside my office, it's perfectly fine (10 feet away).
I've attached an image of the signal graph generated by the Time Capsule. The yellow line is another AirTunes-only Airport Express on the middle floor, and the dark line is a TiVo on the third floor in the bedroom across the hall from my office. The green line is my laptop. the graph starts from me standing in the hall outside my office and drops down when I walk to my desk. Interesting how the other two are perfectly straight signal lines, and my laptop is all over the place.
What makes this even weirder is that all of the 20 or so wireless networks I can usually see from my office also disappear whenever I lose my connection. This leads me to believe that maybe something is wrong with the airport card on my laptop...or it's some weird software glitch.
I have planned for a while on wiring my office anyway, as I just cannot seem to get a successful wireless network here...so in the end, it may not matter that much...but still any idea what would cause a working wireless network to suddenly blank out and stop working in the middle of the day and never work correctly again? And no, I didn't add any devices...no phones, no microwaves, no satellites...
