Wireless network disconnects are possibly the most infuriating thing ever

September 12th, 2006 - 23:43 | 6 comments

I don’t like wireless networks. Well, that’s not true. Wireless networks are actually great, what I don’t like is supporting wireless networks. There are approximately 900 causes than result in the same symptom: the network disconnecting. It’s surprisingly difficult to even start pinning down the reason, you just have to try things until it starts working again. And even the most stable of connections will just drop off sometimes - that’s just the way it is (once every couple of months is perfectly reasonable behaviour). As you may have gathered, I’m struggling with this at the moment. It seems to disconnect at all security levels, on all channels, with the latest router firmware and card drivers, and never when I’m around and watching. I’m close to replacing the hardware bit by bit, which isn’t a very sophisticated solution.

Ah well. Today was nevertheless good, as I saw a kingfisher. I like kingfishers

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6 Responses to “Wireless network disconnects are possibly the most infuriating thing ever”

1 el tom Sep 12th, 2006 at 11:58 pm

Yeah I hate that, seem to get it every 30 seconds…
2 Simon Sep 13th, 2006 at 10:19 am

Ugh. My Dad wants me to help a friend of his setup their wireless network at some point. I have experience with precisely one such network in which of 4 wireless devices, one never worked (a usb card for my sisters computer) and was replaced with something which sometimes worked, a wireless printer which could be slow to talk to initially and has since been plugged into to the router directly, leaving just a single success story: the integrated wireless in my laptop, which still manages to fail or just be slow enough of the time to be a small irritation. I am thus stalling to avoid the issue
3 Jo Sep 13th, 2006 at 10:26 am

Our does that too, though having one less wire hanging out of the back of my laptop more than makes up for it.
4 Nod Sep 13th, 2006 at 12:27 pm

Heh, andy already knows about my wifi woes- one network card which disconnects on a regular 2-3 minute basis, and a laptop which takes a random amount of time between 1 and 5 minutes to establish a connection when ssid is not broadcast.
5 Lil Sep 13th, 2006 at 7:04 pm

Yay kingfisher!! =D
6 David Coldicutt Nov 23rd, 2006 at 5:44 pm

I’ve just solved my disconnect problem; it was caused by interference from another 2.4G device, in my case a video sender plugged into a scart on the main TV. When anyone switched the TV on, the network dropped out. Switch off the sender or the tele and back it comes. It helps to choose different frequencies for each of your gadgets, but with wireless security cameras, the aforesaid senders, routers etc all using the same four frequencies it’s not easy to run them all at once. But that was definitely the cause of my frustrating network problems. Hope this helps someone else.
Dave

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