Worse signal because my computer thinks it's in Australia?

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1101

3122 posts

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#2825509 7-Dec-2021 08:43

robertosc:

My reasoning was that the router was maybe designed to work at a higher output but it's capped at a lower output because of regulations. So if I'm getting something new, should I be worried that it can come from Australia.

Even if your routers wifi output is 1W , your devices still need to communicate back on their much much lower wifi output.
Its 2 way , more power isnt the answer .

"came from Australia"
NZ doesnt make routers. Neither does Aus (I assume) :-)
Buy something in NZ . In theory it should be NZ certified , if for sale in NZ (or that used to be the regulation) .

My small 3bedroom single level house is also terrible for wifi . Some sites & homes just are.
What made a difference for me was the Spark supplied Smart Router .

SomeoneSomewhere

1802 posts

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#2826135 7-Dec-2021 17:43

My understanding is that the way it works for most modern gear is something like this:

All active access points broadcast the region they think they're in as part of the SSID broadcast.
When first powered up, new devices canvas the active devices in the nearby area, and take on the region of nearby APs. If nothing is broadcasting, it uses the last known region.
Manually changing the region of a device is not supported, to stop people changing the region to a more permissive one, then broadcasting on illegal channels.
Region is not factory set or locked, because this allows for more supply chain flexibility, and prevents parallel-imported products broadcasting on illegal frequencies.

As OP has found, this can cause problems when an 'island' of devices thinks they're in the wrong region.

Regulators don't like end users being able to manually change the region, even if it involves resorting to command line options. So the ability is usually locked out.

Ways to fix this? Not sure.

I think some devices like cellphones will prioritise other sources of location (e.g. cell network), so perhaps use that as an AP then reboot router.
Move router to another neighbourhood that thinks it's in NZ, then back.
Set up an older or custom-firmware router that does allow you to specify region.

raytaylor

4014 posts

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#2826327 7-Dec-2021 23:41

Location is usually set within the device.

The USA country code typically covers everything.

Eg. Channels 1-11 are legal in the USA but channel 13 is illegal there, but you can use channel 13 in NZ.

The problem is that some client devices like laptops and cellphones wont connect to anything on channel 12 and 13 so you might as well have it set for the USA anyway.

This was a problem for routers set to auto channel and they would decide to land on channel 13.

Signal is a combination of

TX Power + TX Antenna - path loss + RX Antenna = RX signal.

Path loss is air and walls along the route.

If your client device transmits at the same power level as the AP, the signal will be equal on both ends even if the AP/router has a big external antenna. Not only would it transmit further, it will recieve from further away.

But if the tx power is different on each end, then there will be an imbalance and you may have good rx signal indicated on the bars on your client device wifi icon indicator, but the actual throughput will be lossy.

Also having a larger antenna will mean you pick up more noise from neighboring routers.

The best solution is multiple APs creating small "cells" of coverage around the house, and low transmit power so your client device will roam across to the nearer AP rather than try to hang on to a more distant AP if you move about the house. Each AP is on a different channel with the same SSID and password, set to channel 20mhz width.

My suggestion is to upgrade the router - i saw a mention of NOW being the isp and they use the NF18ACV as standard - its got a CPU that can handle a gigabit and is quite fast with pppoe connections too.

Then add the TPLink powerline wifi extension kit such as a TL-WPA4220 or TL-WPA8631P

Wifi is always slower than cabled and so you typically wouldnt see much more than 80-140mbps in an urban environment.

Ray Taylor

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SomeoneSomewhere

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#2826389 8-Dec-2021 00:30

Setting things to the USA is about to become a problem - they've allowed 6GHz channels (WiFi 6E), but we haven't yet. And we may or may not open the whole band when we do.

Probably not much of an issue as few devices support that band so far.

richms

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#2826397 8-Dec-2021 01:28

Wifi 6e has activation processes where the AP will not just use the band, so I doubt that things would activate those channels when not in the USA. Sure, someone might find a way to force it to do so, but then they would have to have client devices that would use it as well connect, and then those devices or the AP be close enough to outside for enough signal to get out to actually bother anyone.

Apple stopped using the 802.11d broadcasts a long time ago. I modified one of the beacon spammer sketches for the ESP8266 to add country frames ages ago to see what would happen with apple stuff, and the answer is nothing bad. They all showed up in wireshark or kismit correctly, but even with all sorts of them coming up on the 2.4GHz band everything would still connect to and use all the 5GHz stuff that it saw.

Richard rich.ms

robertosc

49 posts

Geek

#2828952 8-Dec-2021 20:53

Yeah I just learned that I can see more details about the wifi connection and I can see that my Mac is connected to channel 44 and using country code NZ despite of the router being set to Japan... so I guess it's all fine.

raytaylor:

Also having a larger antenna will mean you pick up more noise from neighboring routers.

Ok, now I finally understand why having a bigger antenna in the router is not a solution for hearing low-powered output devices from a long distance.

raytaylor:

The best solution is multiple APs creating small "cells" of coverage around the house, and low transmit power so your client device will roam across to the nearer AP rather than try to hang on to a more distant AP if you move about the house. Each AP is on a different channel with the same SSID and password, set to channel 20mhz width.

How big do you think the cell radius should be? For example, considering a hypothetical house composed by 3x4m rooms.

raytaylor

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#2829050 9-Dec-2021 01:19

I just checked the floor area a few houses we recently have done professional installations in of different sizes and the number of APs we installed.

68m2+ 1 AP

100m2+ 2 APs

220m2+ 3APs

280m2+ 4APs

But it really depends on the layout.
There was one which is 507m2 but that only required 3 APs because it was very open plan where bedrooms all come off the central lounge atrium. We had all the APs in the long lounge/kitchen to load balance the number of devices as bedrooms were only through one wall.

While another one - 550m2 had a central lounge with two wings of bedrooms in a cross t shape. That required 4 APs.

An L shape 430m2 required 3 APs - two wings of bedrooms with a lounge in the corner.

You shouldnt be more than 2 walls in a transect straight line from the AP at any point in the house.
If the signal would have to bend around a corner or go in a different direction to get through a door, its still a wall in the way as we dont consider the signal to bend around corners.

So in the cross shape house for example, even though its 4 APs and a massive 550m2, we were able to position them so almost anywhere in the house, you werent more than 2 walls from an AP.

Now in this image, I have overlaid my house which exactly 100m2 to compare the size.
However it still requires 2 APs

Because the bedrooms 2 and 3 have lots of walls going back to the lounge, that triggered the need for an extra AP.

I could place one AP in the centre of the hallway and probably get away with it - but there is also the issue of congestion and collision collapse.
Basically each AP is really only useful for intermittent traffic for up to 10 devices, an absolute hard limit maximum of 16 devices connected to the AP at any one time even if not transferring data, or an AP can stream to one device at a time.

If you have two clients streaming at the same time you will suffer collision collapse which I have explained in other posts

So if you put those two clients on different APs - problem solved.

In my case I have two flatmates, each with a TV, XBOX, phone, tablet, smartwatch and girlfriend so definitely need two APs. And we are surrounded by 6 other houses. But thankfully tall metal sheeting fences on all sides reduces much of the noise.

Ray Taylor

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robertosc

49 posts

Geek

#2831467 13-Dec-2021 13:32

Thank you raytaylor for this excellent post and to all the others that helped me here.

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