Poor RSSI in small flat

[mmcdowall]

Hi there,

I'm having major issues with Vodafone home broadband in one of the rooms in my flat, where I work from home. 

Voice / video calls are essentially unusable because every 2-3 minutes, I lose either inbound or outbound media (or both) for 10-15 seconds.  The stats on my Teams client shows a massive spike in packet loss during this time.

Actual broadband speed is fine (I've tested on speed.cloudflare.com) and performance is fine in the rest of the flat, it's really just this one room. This leads me to believe the issue is between the wifi hub and the device; I see in the client monitoring page that the RSSI drops as low as -75dB when I'm in that room, recovering to ~55dB when I sit next to the wifi hub. 75dB is really poor and not suitable for streaming media.

What can I do about this ? Vodafone appear to have inexplicably removed the ability to switch channels. I don't think it's unreasonable to expect a 3 year old router to comfortably cover a 60sqm flat. The room in question is about 30ft and one internal wall away from the wifi hub.  

[CrimsonLiar]

As I use a third-party router I'm surprised at how low the signal strength is even next to the router (I do have one understandably dead spot in the house).  But to get -75dBm on 5GHz here would have me 75m down the road!

So right now I don't have a solution other than running an ethernet cable, using powerline extenders (work well on nice new wiring, not so good on older wiring), or REAL mesh systems!  But I am interested in what sort of signal strength others here get!

[Cynric]

If you go for "big" WiFi do think of the neighbours 😁

[CrimsonLiar]

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@Cynric wrote:

If you go for "big" WiFi do think of the neighbours 😁

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Yes - luckily we're spread out, but the Asus GT-AX6000 is very definitely a bit of a bully (as were its predecessors the RT_AC86U and RT-AC68U) sitting on channel 100/160 1W band on 5GHz and on channel 13 with 40MHz bandwidth all from the default "auto" settings.

[Cynric]

.@CrimsonLiar All that power on 5GHz and you'll have the tinfoil hat brigade protesting that you're harming their kids, who are meanwhile standing around with their mobiles clamped to their ears. 😁😆

[Ripshod]

I'm in a similar size flat. Granted I use an Asus but I have turned the tx power down to 'balanced' to keep everyone around me happy. That said, I get -58dBm at the front door. That's about 10metres, two single brick walls and a full wardrobe away. I stay connected all the way to my sainsbury's local, around 80 metres down the road. 

I'm not surprised really by the results with the vox3. With everything else that's wrong with it I'm glad I moved on.

Common tips include moving the router around to try and get a better signal from the built-in antennas but I don't see this helping much. Worth a try. Definitely move it away from a wall if that's where it is.