[TriLUG] WiFi quality monitoring

[Igor Partola]

So I wanted to wait long enough to confirm this, before emailing in another
update, but my problems magically got reduced to just the 2.4 GHz band and
some devices do not show this behavior. Longer explanation:

I made absolutely no changes to my setup since I last saw the problems.

My laptop started acting better when using the 5 GHz band. Specifically,
ping times have gone down to below 3 ms, and iperf speed stays above 25-30
Mbps consistently. The 2.4 GHz band is also somewhat better, but I do see
occasional jumps to high ping times, though not nearly as bad. On the 2.4
GHz band I generally see pretty decent speeds as well: at least 30 Mbps.

I also hooked up my NAS with a PCI wireless card and the 9 dBi antennas
(it's in the basement so I didn't want to have issues with reception down
there). This machine gets fantastic ping times: 0.5-0.9 ms, and consistent
speeds over 100 Mbps.

So in short, the current state is:

 * MacBook Pro sitting 5 feet way from router: 3 ms ping, 30+ Mbps iperf
 * Dell laptop running Linux: 1-3 ms ping, 30+ Mbps iperf
 * Desktop (2.4 GHz only) on a different floor: 0.9 ms ping, 100+ Mbps
iperf.

What magic made my problems go way? I have no idea. The problems just
suddenly stopped one day, and have not come back in a couple of weeks. I
can't say I'm happy with the fact that I don't know what changed, but at
least I'm not having my video calls dropped all the time.

As usual, thanks everyone for reading/replying.
Igor