WiFi issues on WRT3200ACM

[BlueSwirly]

Update: I'm a little embarrassed at my poor troubleshoot skills, but I'll chalk it up to multiple things going on.

1. Switching from 2.4GHz channel 11 to channel 1 has made the periodic issues reaching internal devices (e.g. laptop to NAS) better. I don't see this issue anymore over the past few days.
2. The Internet connectivity issue that happens every day isn't limited to the 2.4GHz channel at all like I previously thought. When I said my wired connection was good, I was using my security system as the test. Looking at a wireshark trace, it sends one packet about once every 10 seconds saying effectively "yep, still here" and if it doesn't get a response back from the server, it retries until it does. I have since figured out that when my Internet is "down," it isn't really down... it's just dropping 90% or so of the packets that go out (according to ping from my laptop). DNS doesn't seem to work under these bad conditions, so anything that needs hostname resolution or relies on getting packets through the first 10 times fails completely.

At this point, the issue is definitely not OpenWRT. I am thinking it's an issue with the wires in from the street. Thanks for the advice, and sorry for sending people down a rabbit-hole.

[jeff]

Don't underestimate your troubleshooting skills -- intermittent issues are always a challenge to find. It took me months to determine that slow speeds here were due to water literally flowing down the coax from the poles and into my modem.

[BlueSwirly]

So on the slim chance anyone else lands here or is curious... my issues appear to have been due to a intermittently faulty coax splitter.

When it is warmer outside, like in the middle of the day, the power loss through the splitter increases and the modem starts losing traffic. Outbound traffic seemed to be more affected than inbound. I have replaced the splitter and have fingers crossed, but it's been a solid day with no outage.