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I'm looking for some brainstoming ideas to explain why my home wifi
router's performance is suddenly acting so strange: periodically
(about once a day), performance (as tested by speedtest.net)
drastically decreases from ~30Mb/s to ~4Mb/s.<br>
<br>
When this happens, there's nothing I can do to make it better.
Rebooting the router has no effect. The speed comes back when its
good and ready - not before. These "outages" usually last about 12
hours. Performance is bad from all clients - macbook, ubuntu
laptop, phones - so this seems to be router specific - not due to
client config.<br>
<br>
NOTE: tests via 10baseT wired connections are consistently at
29+Mb/s; wifi is 26-29 when good, when bad between 0.9 and 4Mb/s.
When the wifi is bad, the wired results remain good: so this is a
wifi problem - can't blame it on comcast :) <br>
<br>
The router is an Asus RT-N16 running Tomato/Shibby. Google shows
others getting much better throughput with this hardware/firmware
combo (70+Mb/s) so I don't think the router or firmware is likely to
blame (unless I have flakey hardware ?)<br>
<br>
I've been logging through a speedtest-cli cronjob for the past week
and 6 days out of 7, I see this behavior (performance degrades
starting between 9pm and 2am, continues even after the router
auto-reboots at 5am and then eventually returns to normal by about
9am. <br>
<br>
Things I've tried:<br>
<ul>
<li>I cannot identify any equipment in the house that might be
causing radio interference - and certainly nothing that is on a
periodic schedule that matches these overnight outages. </li>
<li>Reboot the router - has no effect.</li>
<li>Checked that this is not client specific. When the performance
degrades, I measure the same throughput on all clients (laptops,
phones).<br>
</li>
<li>There is no load on the wifi during these outages (no long
running file transfers, backup rsync's or streaming).<br>
</li>
<li>I disabled bandwidth and ip monitoring (which I understand to
be a known bottleneck in Tomato). This improved the "normal"
throughput a bit, but has not solved the periodic slow
"outages".<br>
</li>
<li>I moved the router to a variety of locations (on theory that
there may be some unusual interference on one location or the
other)</li>
</ul>
<br>
I'm looking for ideas of more things to try before I reflash the
original firmware and see if Asus's software works better...
(followed by trash the asus and buy a new router :( ).<br>
<br>
Help! (and thanks,)<br>
Steve<br>
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