Walls, bricks, mobile devices, and WiFi networks – a good mixture of stuff, not all of which plays nice together….
I’ve recently been re-architecting my home network, so that all of my mobile devices (and in those include laptop and netbook, since they are portable) can access a network easily, no matter where I am in the house. Now, I don’t have the largest of house by any means, but the surprising effects of a few decent walls are that a WiFi signal for example becomes extremely erratic.
To counter this problem, I have encrypted powerline networking running, allowing the re-hubbing of the wireless signal – since mobile device don’t have the greatest WiFi aerials, it is a case of needing to put a wireless signal in proximity of them.
Then the other day a though occurred to me – how many lots of wireless overlap do I have running? Well I reckon it’s at least 4 lots:
- Wireless network 1
- Wireless network 2 (created because the first doesn’t reach to certain areas of the house)
- Baby Monitor type 1
- Baby (Video) Monitor type 2
All of these operate in the 2.4GHz band, right in that sweetspot of WiFi – and then on top of that you can add another 6 networks (at least) from neighbours in the near vicinity. That’s a LOT of crossover, yet everything seems to work – for now.
So I think that’s a decent amount of overlap wirelessly, going on at home – question is, can you beat it? C’mon, post up a comment and let us know – including whether you get any interference issues….