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Comment by kwyjobojoe | Hacker News Reader

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

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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.

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