Ten Ways to Troubleshoot Wireless LAN Performance

In This Chapter

Moving your access point(s)

Flipping channels

Boosting your signals

Checking your cordless phones
Although troubleshooting any piece of network equipment can be frustrating,
when you deal with wireless equipment, it’s a little more so
because there’s so much that you just can’t check. After all, radio waves
are invisible. That’s the rub with improving the throughput (performance)
of your wireless home network, but we’re here to help. And don’t get hung up
on the term throughput — it’s just the actual rate of the data flowing when you
take into account retransmissions attributable to errors.
The trick to successful troubleshooting anything is to be logical and systematic.
First, think about the most likely issues and work from there (no matter
how improbable). The second thing to do is to be systematic. Networks are
complicated things, which mandates sequential troubleshooting thinking on
your part. Patience is a virtue when it comes to network debugging.
But perhaps hardest of all is making sense of performance issues, which
is the subject of this chapter. First of all, you can’t get a lot of great performance
reporting from consumer-level access points (the much more expensive
ones sold to businesses are better at that). And even so, debugging
performance based on performance data in arrears is tough. Fixing performance
issues is a trial-and-error, real-time process. At least most wireless
client devices have some sort of signal strength meter, which is one of the
best sources of information that you can get to help you understand what’s
happening. (This is a key point, and these signal strength meters are used by
the pros, says Tim Shaughnessy at NETGEAR: “I would highlight it as a tool.”
We agree.)
It’s a good idea to work with a friend or family member. Your friend can be in
a poor reception “hole” with a notebook computer with the wireless utility
showing the signal strength. You can try moving or configuring the AP to see
what works. Just be patient — it can take a few seconds for the signal meter
to react to changes.
Because not all performance issues can be tracked down . . . or at least not
easily . . . in this chapter, we introduce you to the most common ways to
improve the performance or your wireless home network. These are triedand-
true tips, having been there ourselves. We’re pretty good at debugging
this stuff by now. We just can’t seem to figure out when it’s not plugged in!
(Well, Pat can’t . . . read the next section to see what we mean.)