FCC Takes Over Your WiFi

I remember some Wifi hot spots use to travel sometimes 600 feet or more. I also notice that recently consumer Wifi devices seem to transmit less and it seems to have happened after 2006. My friend had a Netgear router out of the box that I could connect to and walk several houses down the street and still connect to it with a laptop. The library in town has Wifi that goes around 200 Ft. But now I had two different ISP's which proveded their own router. By the time I open my door and go on the porch I could no longer connect. This may be something we need to study as to the reason for this. It could also effect our petition for greater range on FM too. I use to say that FM should go as far as a public Wifi hot spot and to adjust your transmitter to have the same range to a digital Boom Box or car Stereo. But now if you were to do that you'll have lessor range because the new devices are lucky to travel 50-75 feet. I have to ask why the sudden dramatic decrease in range for WiFi? And can this effect FM or een AM part 15 in the future?

My daughter lives across the street about 150 feet away. I purchased a Belkin WIFI extender for 50 bucks. I configured it to relay her signal all over my house. I feel so ashamed. I AM ASKING FOR HELP! Does anyone else have this problem?

Thank you John for sharing your story. You have shown us the way to go.

The 2.4 and 5.8 MHz bands were designated for ISM use which means devices which produce incidental radiation (e.g. a microwave oven) do so on these frequencies. When the need for what evolved into WiFi arose it was assigned to these bands since doing so would not encroach on other bands/services. This sort of works because WiFi uses a frequency hopping spread spectrum technique where several users can be active in the same band at the same time.

To a user it appears that they have a clear frequency since in spread spectrum systems one doesn't "hear" an interfering signal and what happens is that the signal to noise ratio (SNR) for a user's signal decreases as more users enter the band. Shannon's Rule relates the digital channel capacity to the SNR and predicts lowered capacity with lowered SNR so WiFi devices respond by slowing down so the user sees either slower speed or reduced range or both.

The solution for each user is not to increase power since doing so results in the same problem spread over a wider area. One of the features of the DD-WRT software is to enable the user to do just that. I looked into replacing the native software for my Netgear router with DD-WRT with the hope of gaining more functionality and haven't yet been able to justify this, but researching DD-WRT revealed that it can increase the power of my router's signal by about 30 percent.

Should the FCC worry about this? I don't know, but a better solution to the growing congestion on the WiFi bands is to do for WiFi what was done for AM, TV, and cell phone services, namely expand permitted operation to other bands. Restricting DD-WRT or other firmware from increasing power is the easy way out which will not solve the fundamental problem caused by an exponential increase in the number of devices using these bands. It serves as only a feel good response from the FCC and doesn't help current or future Wi-Fi or Bluetooth users.

Neil