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Comment by throwaway8581 | Hacker News Reader

Crazy thought, but maybe communicate with them and try to work out a solution?

If a neighbour asks you to turn off half your devices indefinitely so their network works better, what exactly are you supposed to do?

There is literally no benefit if you are this person to acknowledging its you. From their perspective you might be a well informed tech person or just crazy, but either way you don't want to be dealing with them everytime anything goes wrong with their wifi.

And it's pretty obvious the person ranting doesn't feel this problem rises to the issue of "spend $50 to get a 5ghz router and dongle".

I think he mentions trying 5ghz somewhere in the thread, but his house's internal construction interferes with the signal. It is a little odd how long it takes for someone to suggest that, though.

> And it's pretty obvious the person ranting doesn't feel this problem rises to the issue of "spend $50 to get a 5ghz router and dongle".

I'm all for 5ghz, but where are you getting an AP and dongle for $50?

Edit: To clarify, I'm skeptical, but if you're serious then links and/or model numbers would be appreciated:)

Something like a TP-Link AC-1200 plus a $10 AC dongle should give you pretty good speeds for around $50 total.

I'm not skeptical of people being able to get a 5 GHz router setup for that price, but I am skeptical that everyone can make 5 GHz work. There are still devices that are 2.4 GHz only and some apartments where 5 GHz doesn't cut through the walls correctly.

I just bought a Cudy WR2100 for $30; 5ghz AC router with openwrt to deliver wifi to my second floor.

Oh, that's lovely; I hadn't realized they'd gotten so cheap:)

The neighbour definitely has problems with his wifi as well, so fixing the issue would be beneficial for everyone.

Step 1 would be to use APs that are connected with ethernet instead of Mesh-type APs. That would greatly reduce the amount of data that needs to be transmitted (with mesh, your signal needs to be repeated multiple times. With ethernet it's just transmitted once)

Step 2 would be adjusting power output of each AP. If the neighbour has multiple APs, they probably don't each need to run on full power.

Step 3 would be looking for devices that transmit a lot of data. I assume most of the 120 devices don't cause a lot of traffic. Maybe there's just a few that cause 90% of the traffic. Maybe the most traffic intensive devices (eg. camera) could be replaced with a wired connection.

I'm assuming the neighbour doesn't know anything about how to optimize Wifi networks, but OP sounds knowledgable, so maybe they could work together to fix the issue.

It can be a Win-Win situation: OP gets a usable 2.4GHz channel, Neighbour also gets better connectivity.

I've had similar problems in my neighbourhood, I can't honestly find out who it is.. i kinda know the direction, and have tried talking to each of the units and everyone denies it is them.

First - that's definitely super frustrating and I'm sorry you're dealing with it.

It's possible that the person who's causing the problem doesn't know they're the problem. Like, if the underlying cause of this problem is "not super techno-savvy" then they might not realize what they're doing :)

Drones are great for pinpoint WiFi mapping. :)

So is a Yagi antenna, and you can make the latter out of scrap :).

Yeah, I don't think I'd know if I were doing this. I really don't think I am, but default settings and shitty proprietary IoT devices make me unsure...

And lose the chance to rant about it on the Internet?!

If he does this, and the neighbor decides not to do anything, OP can’t run de-auth attacks later on to free up the network, or he will be immediately suspect.

The only sure fire way to solve this is de-auth.

That just gets you a neighbor running even more wifi stuff to try and fix whatever 'bad connection' problem is happening.

That might work, but also, it's possible 120 devices is simply too many for one person to be using in an apartment complex. Wireless spectrum is a shared resource, it's not okay to hog it.

If not 120, imagine someone with 200 or 1000 devices. At some point you've eaten more than your quota of spectrum and you owe it to your neighbors to stop hoarding IOT devices.

Edit: heh, not believing in scarce resources is peak Orange Site.

In an ideal world that might be true, however, in our world currently there's no such thing as "your quota of spectrum"; wireless spectrum is a shared resource but people are allowed to hog it. FCC does not prescribe that the spectrum usage should be shared equally or equitably; within the allowed limits and without intentional harm (e.g. deauthers) you're each allowed to try and use as much as you can. The person running 120 or 200 or 1000 devices is entitled to assert that they don't, in fact, owe anything to their neighbours - on the other hand, they would be entitled to protection and FCC intervention if the neighbours attempt to deauth their devices as suggested in other comments. You're welcome to try and hog the shared resource yourself, but preventing others from hogging a lot of the shared resource is illegal.

Sure, there are scarce resources; and what we're seeing is the expected results of the tragedy of commons for a shared resource.

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