is it really "illegal" to set your wifi channel range to a non UK range?

[r7slayer]

Yea wifi congestion is something which absolutely does my head in as part of working for the technical support side for a ISP. Many customers think that the ISP guarantees the speed and service over wifi but this is just not the case. a lot of the time people call about their connection dropping and having poor speed just for you to find their connection appears fine and router is syncing at a much higher speed than they are reporting and it's thier wifi connection that has the issue. (Suggesting this goes down like a tone of bricks even though i'm right 9/10 times.)

Even after suggesting changing wifi channels they think they shouldn't have to do this as they pay for a "service" I just wish routers were smart enough to find the best and least congested channels to use instead of manually having to do it.
2.4Ghz is becoming way too congested nowa days.

 

[bremen1874]

The routers should be smart enough to pick the most suitable channel.

Unfortunately as soon as you start recommending people to manually select channels you break the auto selection option for their neighbours.

IMO 2.4Ghz should be limited to channels 1, 6 and 11 with an enforced standard auto selection algorithm.

 

[joeyjojo]

Many customers think that the ISP guarantees the speed and service over wifi but this is just not the case. a lot of the time people call about their connection dropping and having poor speed just for you to find their connection appears fine and router is syncing at a much higher speed than they are reporting and it's thier wifi connection that has the issue. (Suggesting this goes down like a tone of bricks even though i'm right 9/10 times.)

Must admit I've fallen foul of this too. In my case it was a crappy WiFi dongle limiting the speed, which I couldn't believe until the support lady convinced me to test with a laptop over ethernet. Using a wireless bridge now though so all good!

 

[asim18]

IMO 2.4Ghz should be limited to channels 1, 6 and 11 with an enforced standard auto selection algorithm.

There's a reason the available spectrum isn't divided into only 3 completely isolated channels. It's because RF becomes attenuated and this variable also needs to be considered. The position of the antenna has an effect on the signal strength.

Say your neighbour on the left is using channel 1 but his router is right next to the wall and his signal is very strong
and your neighbour on the right is using channel 6 but his router is at the other end of the house, it is still overlapping on the frequency band but the signal is very weak.
In such a situation you could use channel 4 or 5 to fit into a sweet spot in between both access points.

So no, you should never only use 1, 6, 11. And auto selection should be avoided. WiFi channels of fixed access points should be selected upon installation by a qualified network engineer who uses a spectrum analyser to find the best channel out of ALL 13 available channels. Only portables like wifi hotspots should be using auto selection. There's no reason for 20 fixed access points in a particular vicinity to be using auto selection. Especially if you're working in a long row of 100+ terraced houses or in blocks of flats. One local outage and everyone rebooting at the same time will usually mess up autoselection.

 

[bremen1874]

In such a situation you could use channel 4 or 5 to fit into a sweet spot in between both access points.

Two years to come up with that?

So now you're potentially receiving (and causing) interference from the neighbours on channels 1 and 6 because you've overlapped both of them.

In your scenerio you should use channel 11 if it's free or channel 1 if it isn't. Networks on the same channel will coexist better that overlapping networks (https://www.metageek.com/training/resources/adjacent-channel-congestion.html).

 

[bigredshark]

WiFi channels of fixed access points should be selected upon installation by a qualified network engineer who uses a spectrum analyser to find the best channel out of ALL 13 available channels.

Would you like to reflect briefly on how utterly unfeasible that is in the real world? I mean, seriously, it'd be lovely if everything in the world was only done by professionals but that's never going to happen and of all those things - this is right near the bottom of the list.

The defaults work pretty well for most people and if they didn't then killing the entire 2.4 band and forcing people to use 5Ghz only would be a much better strategy. Indeed, once the old generation of 2.4Ghz only devices become less prevalent and mesh network become more robust and performant (because you'll need more APs for 5Ghz only and mesh is the easy way to get there) then I expect that will start to happen...

Of course, the future of wifi and home broadband is interesting long term with 5G, I'd guess that in 10 years a sizeable percentage of people will do without a 'home' connection and fixed line connections and wifi will be a more specialist / enthusiast area.