longtime viewers will know that I've had my fair share of problems with all of
the tech that I've stuffed into my new house but one of the biggest pain points
has been the wi-fi at first I thought it might be random interference from dodgy
smart home gadgets and then I blamed the devices themselves which would just
disconnect and then refuse to reconnect seemingly at random but as it turned out
the answer was both more complicated and
also simpler than I thought every one of
my access points had defaulted to channel one in the 2.4 GHz band which
meant that even though I never configured that I had a traffic jam of
2.4 GHz Wi-Fi around my entire house
which got me thinking is it possible to have too much Wi-Fi how bad would that
be and it's already completely bricked
our video streams turns out pretty bad
so if you want to improve your Wi-Fi at home the answer is not to put an access
point in every room though you know what you could put in every room wa no not
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nice as fun as it would be to start here
first we need to back up a little we have a full video on this EMC Chamber
from Raymond DMC but the tldr is this
room blocks radio waves creating an
absolutely ideal environment for testing manufacturer claims so we've got our one
access point here configured to 2.4 GHz Channel 1 and we've got our Wi-Fi 7
laptop over there which we'll be using to complete a 10 GB file
transfer and go wow that's really impressive but
it's still going to take a while so while we wait for that to complete I
should probably explain why you would never see these results at home 2.4 GHz
has been in use for Wi-Fi since 802.11b hit the market back in
1999 it has some major drawbacks these
days but also a few key advantages that
keep it in use namely its Legacy compatibility its Superior maximum range
and its very low implementation cost
unfortunately it's these very same ah
advantages that can turn 2.4 GHz into
such a nightmare allow me to demonstrate well I just did I bet those speeds Dro
to like half right uh they're all oh now they're
going down there they go yep took a second but they're about half now cool
right but not scientific let's get the door closed and show you what happened
in a controlled environment I'm going to go out on a
limb here and say you probably don't live in an electromagnetic isolation
cell so let's try to create a more
realworld environment within our cell in
our scenario you live in a windowless apartment with neighbors on all six
sides and those will be represented by the six access points that we're going
to position around the room I'm going to assume that your internet
service provider negotiated an exclusivity deal with the builder so all
of your neighbors have the same default router running factory default settings
and would you look at that seven Wi-Fi
let's do the same file transfer yeah it's not bad oh but it sure as heck
isn't 20 megabytes a second no problem you say as long as we aren't all
streaming Netflix at the same time it shouldn't be a problem and yet it is
it's not the slowest thing ever but it's definitely slower than what we saw last
time so what's going on Meet the ypy dbx
while you can use a free app on your phone to see all of the wireless networks around you including which
channels they're operating on which goes a long way you need a spectrum analyzer
tool like this one to see just how busy
the airwaves are these new U7 Pro Max devices also have a built-in antenna
just for spectrum analysis meaning that once you install them you can then
actually check check where they're conflicting which channels are issues
and the waterfall effect just like the Y spy and you can actually see right here
on channel one where all of our access points are loaded up we are looking at
anywhere from 35 to 45% utilization and
what's really wild is the traffic you're seeing isn't from them doing anything
it's just from them looking for devices that might want to connect to them so
let's kick things up a notch and play a YouTube video and
as expected basically no difference I
mean if you couldn't watch a YouTube video when you had six neighbors Wi-Fi
wouldn't work at all so this shouldn't be a surprise but what happens if your
neighbors all get home and start streaming video as well I can see the
utilization changing wow that's a lot
more traffic already yep I don't even have all of them connected yet there you
go all six of our neighbors that's a lot spicier basically
red equals bad and what's really interesting is that even though our
utilization isn't 100% you can see
frequent hitches in our phones here oh
oh that one's really bad now parseek being a realtime streaming application
rather than loading in chunks like YouTube is a worst case scenario but
it's also a real world one so let's see
what our file transfer looks like with all of those running at the same time
actually that's better than I expected but definitely slower what's even more
interesting though is the way that now instead of just this one hitching all
the time they're all doing it as they
wait around for their turn to transfer data but wait hold on a second lonus
what are the phones waiting for each phone is connected to just one of our
six access points they're not sharing the connection with anything else ah but
to use a classic networking analogy where data payloads are cars and
wireless spectrum is roads you can actually see in the utilization here
that because they are all using the factory default configuration they're
all sharing the same road this limits the maximum total bandwidth across all
of these devices in spite of the fact that they're all connected to different
access points this creates traffic jam situations as the APS and the connected
devices fight to decide whose turn it is to go now the obvious solution would be
to add more roads for these guys to drive on and they do do that in most
cases the 2.4 GHz Spectrum has three nonoverlapping channels but this only
helps if everyone works together to avoid using the same channels as each
other and even then it only helps to a point While most real Apartments don't
have neighbors on every single side because of 2.4 gz's incredible wall all
penetrating power it's still common to see as many as a couple of dozen nearby
access points that are clogging up the airwaves and we're about to kick things
up another notch to show you why that can be such a problem after we check on
that file transfer oh I'm going to make
it s oh God I didn't make it it is much
slower yeah I don't feel like waiting around for this you're going to get I'll
get the actual times of them you'll make graphs and stuff yeah
nice let's put in some more APS let's do
it now courtesy of ubiquity instead of
six neighbors we're going to have 50 now
we didn't have 50 phones to pair of them but as you're about to see just having
this many APS in a room together is going to cause some serious problems
are these ones here plugged in they're boing up yeah no I I see them
flashing and it's already completely
bricked our video streams the thing to remember here guys is none of the access
points we just put in the room are actually connected to anything but what
about our file transfer Elijah I don't even think you'll get it started but go
for it I'm still connected to Wi-Fi which is more than some of my devices
could do at home yes they would disconnect and simply not be able to
reconnect maybe that's good news then I
doubt it it already lagged at the beginning it hasn't even figured out
that it's the same file that's right cuz it would ask for
the copy replac it hasn't even prompted me if I want to overwrite it oh hold on
let's uh let's fire up the Spectrum analyzer this will still work because it
doesn't rely on being connected to Wi-Fi oh we've exceeded their default scale uh
which is at minus 80 DB ah here we go I
didn't know it went that color of red that is a very very swamped Network and
what's really interesting is Elijah go ahead and kill the attempts at Parx
streaming here look at this even with
all the parex streams dead that utilization is still 100% and most of
these don't have any devices connected to them and even the ones that do aren't
transferring anything so what's on the road a lot of things sending out
multiple pings a second to check for devices to connect to uh checking for
devices it might have lost a connection to or sometimes they're even trying to
adjust their settings based on detecting traffic that might be in the air and
when you get enough of this background noise traffic this results in an
environment where we can't even begin transferring a file so what can we do to
fix it we can start by changing the
channel very fun funny now your
interface is probably going to look a little bit different but nearly every
wireless router or access point has a similar option buried somewhere in the
admin control panel allowing you to select another Channel there are a
couple of things to watch out for though and the first one is selecting the right
one we'd recommend downloading an app such as Wi-Fi man to see which channels
are most utilized in your area so that you can select one that is well not
those ones another thing to watch out for is not getting tempted by the in
between channels they might look less utilized but because of the way they
overlap with channels 1 six and 11 they can end up causing more problems than
they solve now I can practically hear you asking lonus why would I do any of
this when I can just enable automatic Channel switching and that's a good
question sometimes as a set and forget solution it can be great but depending
on your device and more importantly your neighbor's devices they might only scan
for access points while they're booting up which can lead to them accidentally
ending up stuck on suboptimal overlapping channels while you're in
here by the way load balancing between channels is the most important step but
a surprisingly effective strategy to help everyone around you out can be to
lower the transmit power of your access point if everyone in an apartment
complex did this everyone's speed within their unit would probably be the same
but they'd be much less likely to interfere with their neighbors outside
of their unit the last big fix is to move any devices that you can off of 2.4
GHz for me this unfortunately wasn't possible since I have a handful of smart
devices that only work on 2.4 GHz but
for everything else 5 GHz and especially 6 GHz offer multiple benefits which is a
huge advantage of Wi-Fi 7 devices like UniFi lineup that we used Wi-Fi 7
capable devices are able to dynamically switch between 65 and 2.4 GHz bands to
adjust for latency or any other factors that may be affecting your connection
with some devices even supporting mlo or multi-link operation allowing your
client devices to connect using all three bands at the same time which
Aggregates their bandwidth together for greater overall performance the only
drawback is that compared to 2.4 they don't offer the same range that's why
the best installations configure their APS to use a combination let's say
you're in a pretty big house or a small business and you've got an AP right in
the middle you need to extend your 5 GHz range to the far reaches of the building
so okay you add two more APS but now
your 2.4 GHz devices are all talking over each other well no problem most APS
allow the 2.4 GHz radio to be turned off
so you can have your range and eat your speed too in the real world nailing down
all of these optimizations can be challenging though especially if you
aren't on the best terms with your neighbors but who knows maybe if you
show them this video they might see how if we all cooperate there's enough
Wireless Spectrum for everyone and now
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video maybe check out the one where I first set up Wi-Fi 60 access points in
my house and uh forgot to disable 2.4 on
some of them maybe it's time to upgrade to Wi-Fi 7 is it time let's do it I
noticed we have a bunch of APS in there