Too Much Wireless?

A decade ago, when broadband finally made it as far as the deepest, darkest reaches of rural Hampshire, an entire 5 miles from the centre of Winchester, I had to pull Ethernet cables around the house to get connectivty. These days, of course, that sounds so 20th century! I don't suppose it is possible to buy a brodband router without wireless, these days.

Wireless connectivity is very convenient, of course. But that very convenience is becoming a problem. More and more domestic appliances are crowding into the available band at 2.4 GHz. And the issue is not just the equipment in your own home. Wireless signals penetrate walls, so the environment in which your equipment has to operate includes that of your neighbours.

I've recently been struggling with interference problems that have been so bad they've limited our broadband speed, which is not great to begin with. First, our old land line phone had wireless hansdsets that caused problems for our router. Then, the wireless mice and keyboards on two of our systems also caused interference. In both cases, the interference affected broadband speed because it caused interference on the ADSL line.

I suppose the take away from this is that if you think you're getting less bandwidth than you should, see if you might be suffering wireless interference.