(question) 11 WiFi channels -- which one?

[Colin McGregor]

On Mon, Jan 23, 2012 at 12:38 AM, William Park <opengeometry-FFYn/CNdgSA at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> My Wireless router (Linksys WRT54G) has 11 channels.  Which one do I
> select?  My guess is that for single router (my case), it doesn't
> matter.  And, those multiple channels are for multiple wireless routers,
> where each router will be given different channel.  Is that right?

The first thing you want to do is a site scan, see what channel(s)
your neighbors are using (ie: if you have 20 neighbors all using
channel 1, then channel 1 should be your LAST choice). The next issue
to consider is co-channel interference. For the 2.4GHz WiFi signals to
not interfere with each other the centre of the signal needs to be
25MHz apart, but the channel assignments for the channels are closer
than 25 MHz (sigh, grumble at regulators). What this means is that if
you wanted the maximum number of non-interfering channels, you would
be looking at 1, 6 and 11 (because channels 2-5 will cause differing
amounts of interference to channels 1 and 6. Likewise channels 7-10
will cause differing amounts of interference to channels 6 and 11).

In other words my advice see which of the three channels, 1, 6 and 11
are least used in your area, and go there. Further if you have a
number of neighbors who have gotten weird and picked, say channel 2
then you want to be on channel 7 or above...

To do site scans I use the program WiFi Radar which is available as a
standard package for Debian
(http://packages.debian.org/squeeze/wifi-radar) and likely most other
major Linux distributions...

Hope this helps.

Colin.

P.S. In case anyone in suburbia thinks that detecting 20 WiFi signals
is ridiculously high, let me note that from where I am (mid-town
Toronto) I have picked up over 50 WiFi signals on a single site scan
(though granted, I am likely towards the upper limit as to what anyone
would see in the real world).

> --
> William
> --
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