I’ve got a strange one. In the past few weeks, I’ve been getting support calls regarding poor or NO connections at night. most say, uncollaborated, that is starts around ten PM. Nothing has changed on my network, other than the latest firmware updates. I’m at a loss. I don’t know if it’s increased traffic, weather conditions (mostly dry and cold) or something coming online at night that is causing interference. I don’t see unusally high bandwidth consumption at that time.
We have had some very high winds lately, but I doubt it was strong enough to move antennas. Any thoughts or experiences like this?
If you’ve got a machine that can do it, I highly recomment graphing the signal strength and speed of your customer connections. It gives you the history of their connection and when something like this starts to occur, you can look at those graphs and have a good idea if the problem is local to the customer or local to the AP, because it affects all of your customers at the same time.
That gives you a starting point for your trouble shooting.
When you really get going, you can actually track your customers by location from the AP and identify interference sources by the antenna used by the customers having the problems. It can turn out to be a problem with the antenna at your end, maybe the weather proofing has failed on just one antenna, or it could be some new company that started generating interference from a specific sector.
How do you monitor signal strength and speed ? I can monitor bandwidth consumption via MRTG, but I use senao CB3+, and they, very unfortunately, do now support SNMP2 that I know of
Is this happening in windless conditions? Calm air can lead to inversions, layering and hideous ducting. Might be worth collecting the data UniKyrn suggests and then seeing if there’s a correlation with weather conditions.
i have same problem in some sites in urban area condition
my problem is simple, in mayor streat in the city after closing shops, owners of those locations plug on security cameras in that area
we have make complete site survey of that zone and sitations is like this, on that site we measure with 6dBi panel antena from all directions and all channels and all polarizations fluctuating noise from -60 to -80 dB
I too have had this problem last few nights between 12 pm - 8 am. I thought it was to do with temperature being to low for the hardware. I found no loss of signal when the problems occured just loss of packets. I’m still trying to troubleshoot don’t yet know really what it is in my case?
FYI I just found my night mystery??? It turned out to be a DNS bomber type thing. All I know is I spotted a user with a constant 512kbps up and down simaltaniously only to the routers local ip address on port 53 doing dns requests. It was killing the wireless link and caused problems with dns request delays to other users. It seemed to start at 11.30 at night and stop in the morning?? don’t know why. I tried dropping the connections in the MT firewall but it still was causing network load as it was still uploading to the router authough the router did drop the replys. I had to disconnect the customer by wireless disconnect to solve the problem compleatly. I will have to call him tommorrow and ask him to check his PC for virus etc
