For ages, I’ve been having trouble with my wi-fi connection. It seems to chug along nicely for a couple of months then suddenly it will start dropping out and devices will stop connecting. This goes on for a couple of days until I get annoyed enough to phone Spark and someone will tell me to restart the router and change the channel (which I will have already done a couple of times by then). Last time they also got me to rename the SSID and choose a new password “with no special characters”.

FYI: I have VDSL, with the Spark-issued Thomson/Technicolor TG789vn V2. In the house there is a HP Windows 7 desktop and a Canon Pixma printer which are connected pretty much all the time, plus a HP Windows 8 laptop, two iPads, one iPhone, and two android phones, two or three of which are probably connected any time somebody is home. I think it is an issue with the wireless portion of the router, as plugging the desktop or laptop into one of the Ethernet ports seems to work, even when these devices can’t connect wirelessly. And this morning I received a Huawei HG630b that Spark sent me to try for seven days, to see whether the problem is in the wi-fi section of the Technicolor.

So, I want to get this thing sorted out once and for all. Problem is, I’m no wireless technology expert so what I’d like to do is list things that I’m aware could be affecting my wi-fi signal, and invite comments about these from the professionals, and maybe get some suggestions of things I haven’t thought of. So here we go:

Router location
It’s in a hallway in the geographic centre of my house. There wouldn’t be more than two plasterboard walls or 10m between the router and any corner of the house. It has a direct line of sight to the HP desktop which is only 2.5m away and still suffers when the dropouts, etc. occur. Now, it is sitting on a wine rack. The rack is about 1m high, made of metal strips. The strips are about 2cm wide, riveted together with approx. 10cm gaps between them and the router sits alone on top of this structure – is it possible the metal could be affecting it? Also there is a light socket with a CFL (compact fluorescent) bulb about 1m above the router – it’s possible this causes some interference, but the problems occur whether the light is on or off.

Neighbour’s wi-fi
I have the Wifi Analyzer app on my phone and this shows that my next door neighbour and I usually both use channel 11, and there are a number of other signals on channel 1 which are of lower strength than the guy next door. I tried changing to channel 6 to avoid any possible interference caused by overlapping channels but then I could get no connection at all. I then tried switching to channels 1 and 9 but these were no better than 11, with slow speed and dropouts.

Other wireless devices
My daughter has some Logitech G930 wireless gaming headset and some googling revealed that these operate on 2.4GHz so are a possible candidate. I’ll be doing some testing with the Technicolor and the Huawei over the next couple of days, trying with the headset on and off, however these issues started occurring long before she got the headset.

We have some Uniden cordless phones that supposedly operate on 5.8 GHz, but I read something on GZ that these can still interfere with 2.4 GHz signals. I’d be happy to buy new phones that use a different frequency, or DECT, but the problems exist whether the phones are in use or not – in fact, about the only time the phone is in use when the wireless is playing up is when I’m on the phone to Spark.

My wife wears a FitBit One all day, and there is a bluetooth dongle permanently plugged into a USB port on the back of the desktop for synching data from this. Also, the desktop has a wireless mouse and keyboard and there’s a dongle plugged in for that too.

If another wireless device is causing the problem, I’d be happy to look at a dual band router, but I might still have to replace the cordless phones, right?

Other devices
We have nothing else that should be interfering, e.g. baby monitors, wireless audio/video senders, etc. We do have a microwave, but that’s not often used and the problems occur when nobody is reheating last night’s leftover pizza... OK, that last bit is a lie – we never have leftover pizza.

So, open to advice now...