Wifi dropping,

I have a problem with a Wi-fi dropping, it works OK for a days at a time and then either will not connect or connects at really low speeds.

I am working away from from for days or weeks at a time so I hop onto hotspots provided by my ISP (BT).

I was thinking it was environmental but the dBm strengh seems very solid to me.

It is connected as a client, rebind is off and it stops working with no changes made to the router, I have tried a second router to reduce workload but does not make a difference. It is normal for the login to drop from time to time and I just login again. It does not appear to be a DHCP lease issue as these are set at every 30m but renew as required.

It works really well when it works but then for no apparent reason I get these problems.

I am just wondering if there is something I am missing?

Which router hardware do you use?

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There is a way to get more verbose logging from hostapd (or wpa_supplicant / same thing) somehow; that'd tell you if your client has left intentionally, or if it just disappeared.

See https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-developer/debugging#logging_hostapd_behaviour , and check the logs.


Also, -77 dBm is not a particularly strong signal, if you have external antennas, check that they're screwed in correctly and see if any orientation makes a difference.

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For my purpose as long as the difference is above 23 the connection has been adequate and solid enough for my purposes, so 109-77 giving 32 is a lot more than I am used to.

The thing is, normally if the status screen shows the IP4Upstream connections shown in pic above then it usually means the connection has been established and it works.

The logging seems to be a science in itself, apparently verbose has been disabled and the page you referred to showed options to log what you are looking for but I do not know what I am looking for!

Thanks for your help

Netgear R7800, I also have a Linksys W32X but the R7800 is far better at wifi

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Hmmm, I kind of trust the 77 number more than I trust the 109 number (noise comes in all shapes, and -109dBm sounds really low to me).

If you end up running iperf3 -d .. what's the data rate / connection rate while you're using the channel? - I'm thinking it should probably be possible to reverse effective snr from whatever MCS that was chosen.

I guess it's conceivable that you just happen to have spurious noise appearing once in a while that your wifi radios are not able to overcome - or maybe that appears outside of whenever you test stuff and see everything working fine.

( e.g. I have a smart socket device that's reporting -78dBm at 2.4GHz / 20MHz but it's also showing around 30% retries on a 5% channel utilization - yuck!. ... luckily I don't need to toggle the socket often, and if it reconnects it's ok imho.)