After flashing my mobile HTC Wildfire with Cyanogen 7 mod – Android 2.3.7, which is really nice by the way, works faster than HTC’s own Android 2.2.1 build, the only thing I had to do was flash a separate update for the mobile’s wifi/gps/3g connection, GPS wasn’t working. But at home where I’m using a DIR-615 a D-LINK router with b/g/n Wifi and 4 10/100Mbps ports the mobile didn’t get an internet connection through the Wifi. Or it did, but lost it regularly, or was connected to the Wifi but didn’t get internet.
So I thought perhaps the transmit power of my router is not good enough. I had set it on the lowest transmit power upon it’s first connection. And thus I increased the transmit power to medium. Yihaa, my mobile connected properly. Case solved and dismissed!
At least that’s what I thought. The day after I noticed both of my laptops internet was really slow. I speed tested from one laptop to another, that was fine. Internet still slow. Started to suspect a dropout on the providers network. But that seemed fine too. I rebooted my router, my internet cable connection, and oh! internet was back. For 5 minutes, then the connection dropped again to 0.5kbps download and 5kpbs upload.
After digging up a cable from the cellar and connecting that I noticed that a wired connection did not suffer from speed issues. (The same counts for the HTC, did’t seem to suffer from bandwidth drop, which is weird)
Then I remembered that I changed the D-LINKs transmit power from low to medium. I thought, no that can’t be it, but it’s the only thing I changed, so I proceeded. Set the transmit power back to low. And yes, both of the laptops suddenly had full WiFi bandwidth again.
I would have never suspected that when connection on low power is fine, it is not fine on higher power.
Accoring to the manual:
- Transmit Power
- Normally the wireless transmitter operates at 100% power. In some circumstances, however, there might be a need to isolate specific frequencies to a smaller area. By reducing the power of the radio, you can prevent transmissions from reaching beyond your corporate/home office or designated wireless area.
What does that have to do with the bandwidth?