Ask Lemmy

My apartment has brick walls, wifi signal, even at full power can barely travel 2 room from the router

No but I live in the middle of nowhere.

I lived in an apt building that the only service provider was att, with a required, unique router. Ever person had the same router, and the routers default settings was to blast at full over 2.4ghz with a 40hz spread.

It was completely unusable. Everyone was jamming everyone else.

I bought a router solely so I could turn off 2.4ghz and use only 5ghz.

I reduced max power, but keep my AP’s set to auto manage up to that max level.

There’s basically a plane of signal that bisects the house where the RSSI of each AP is the same. It intersects with areas where people commonly are on their phones. Depending on humidity, location of people and pets, or even just dumb luck, devices were just bouncing between the AP’s, fishing for whichever had the stronger signal. Dropping the power levels made it so the overlap between the AP’s was less, and adjusting the RSSI at which the AP would hand off clients upward made it so handoffs were less frequent. Small throughput sacrifice in the transition zone, but without the constant bouncing between AP’s (which has no throughput).

No. the AP will use ATPC to limit itself so why do something manually when it does it automagically.

The only devices I've ever used that allow that were super high powered Ubiquity devices that could shoot signal several miles away in a straight line that I installed for a WISP. Even my fancy ASUS router doesn't have any way of lowering the power. 🤨

And the answer is no. Especially when I setup a few Ubiquity Nanos on my own network to shoot my home wifi all across town. I could go down to the city park and still be on wifi. Shit was dope.

You only need to reduce it if it will interfere with another one of your WAPs. In most cases, auto power settings are fine.

Typically you'd reduce it if you had a high density environment with lots of devices (IE office building) because one WAP and network cable can only handle so much traffic, so the WAPs can load balance or have reduced coverage to split the load.

I'm an electrical engineer and into ham radio. WiFi is the last of my concerns, health-wise.

To even begin to worry about that I should first start eating healthier, work out more than once a week, and so something about all the microplastic in my brain, I guess. I'm not a medical processional, but it's pretty far down the list. And regarding power consumption.. This thing uses like 10 W, of which probably <1 is influenced by the radio power.

I let the APs auto manage their tx power. Aerohive firmware does a decent job of not running wide open when it doesn't need to. I also have 1 AP per floor to get adequate coverage.

My cable modem doesn't have Wi-Fi. I turned it off on my router since it's in the basement and there's a dedicated AP down there.

Mine are on different, non-overlapping channels, so there's no need to reduce it.

The router doesn't reach everywhere on the default setting.

I mounted mine to the outdoor TV antenna mast, added an open SSID and set it to 100%. If I'm covering the entire sports oval next to me I might as well share it.

(And yes, I know how to isolate the subnet)

The bare minimum required by me is past the default my ISP-provided router allowed and I ened up having to do a bunch of extra stuff to get full coverage.

So no.

No.

1. It's already a bit too short to reach the sofa in the living room.

2. Even if it did, why? If my neighbors did the congestion would possibly decrease. They don't know how and if I touch their stuff I'm doomed to be their perpetual tech support.

I did not know I could reduce it lol

When I lived in and apartment, I used a WRT wifi router as my bridge, for the sole purpose to boost the signal strength to the maximum, just to power through the interference from other apartments. My house came prewired with Cat-6 cables, so now I have small wifi hubs at minimum strength on each floor for my phone and home automation.

Never thought about it. If we did that, we'd probably lose connectivity since we have massive concrete walls.

Do you actually require the 100% !?

I don't know and I don't care enough to test.

i think on mine it is labeled as 'max transmit power'. i dunno how often it will try to max transmit, but I set it enough to cover the usual places i chill around.

sometimes i do require 100%, for science. but on day-to-day, nah.

Naw. I'm in the burbs, in a big house. The 5G signal doesn't reach everywhere, and the 3G isn't too strong in the far corners.

I can see three of my neighbor's networks. Most of the channels are open and clear, so plenty for everyone and no congestion.

I did reduce the WiFi transmit power of my AP because it used to overheat with 100%

I use my cell data in my bedroom because it's more stable than my router connection. I wish I had control of the router, but it's not my house. I'd just move the router to a more centralized location instead of the farthest corner.

Back before I moved, I kept the router at one of the reduced power modes it had built in(can't remember the exact settings) since the room it sat in was the best room for signal distribution, you still got full signal anywhere you went.

I know that i can reduce the upper limit, but then I would need more access points to cover everything.

Yes, but only for 2.4 ghz since I live in a small apartment and there's no benefit to high transmit power in those cases. 5 ghz is another story since it doesn't penetrate walls easily anyway, so no harm to others.

i don't change the power levels, but i have a couple routers (one at home, one at the office) that i've disconnected the (external) antennas to reduce their reach. they're only needed occasionally, and only in the rooms they're located in. the signal that's left is enough.