Over the past few months I have been getting an increasing number of requests for help to setup WiFi networks. I am not just talking about the initial setup, but many ongoing reliability problems. At first I was blaming vendors as most of the problems seem to be associated with one vendor, Belkin. However as time went by, I realised the issue was not just Belkin but applied to a lot of other vendors too. The common factor seemed to be the use of the default channel number and changing the channel fixed the issue.

Then the penny dropped when I re-organised my AV kit at home. Wireless Video senders, wireless security cameras and some baby monitors also use the 2.4 Ghz band.

So I thought I would do some investigation along those lines. I was shocked at what I found.

Firstly the 14 WiFi Channels (not all are available in every country see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_WLAN_channels) have massive overlap, so in a busy area lot of interference will result, reducing the throughput in many circumstances.
Secondly the wireless Video channel could not have a worse frequency allocation, and have the potential to wipe out WiFi signals. Especially as unlike WiFi , which sends in bursts and waits for a reply, an AV sender sends a continuous carrier.
I have created the following diagram to demonstrate the frequency clashes

Click on the thumbnail for the full diagram

In a total geeky moment of boredom i have carried out a WiFi survey

Having used my tructy PDA and a copy of WiFiFoFum here are some of the results
Total discover access points 1005
Access point with NO Wep 227
Access points with BTHomeHub SSID 128
Access points with linksys SSID 39
Access points with belkin 93
Access points with livebox 27
Access points with sky 121
Access points with netgear 39
Access points with 2wire 22
Access points with BTopenzone 2
Access points with with hiden SSID 29
number of unique SSID 714

channel number
1 313
2 11
3 12
4 10
5 9
6 209
7 18
8 7
9 26
10 16
11 351
12 6
13 17

The BT FON WiFi community was launched on the 4th October, I immediately signed up. The community sharing of a small amount of my internet bandwidth, for a massive increase in locations I can get some sort of internet connection seems like a great deal. My best guess is that it will take 9-12 months for this to reach critical mass, such that a free, legal, wifi connection will be available on almost every corner in every estate.

10 days after agreeing to opt-in to BT FON, the firmware on my BT Homehub was upgraded over the wire and started advertising itself as a BTOpenzone hot spot. An examination of the hub configuration laid my main fear to rest, my original configuration has not been touched, and the hub continues to operate on the 10.x.x.x address I use, instead of the more traditional 192.168.x.x. Unfortunately I am no longer able to configure the advanced IP addresses via the web interface so let’s hope I don’t want to change anything.

My Homehub is now running V6.2.6.B, although I have seen 6.2.6.C mentioned on a few forums, I wonder how different that is……. 

According to the Register

Analysis Newspaper and City knives are being sharpened for the UK’s two biggest internet providers this week. Our major infrastructure owners, BT and Virgin Media, are set to release disappointing results at a watershed moment for broadband

By adding a Linksys spa-3102 to my existing TRIXBOX iPBX which is have running under VMWare server on windows 2003, i am now able to route inbound call based on caller id or lack there of (or the number that was dialed if I add some free SIP trunks from sipgate) to any extention in the house or group, but even better a fully featured IVR, lets see how the marketing tossers like a bit of that

I just found this too Littlewoods bombards man by phone

i am currenlty sat in a MS building using the Guest wireless internet, updating my LAMP blog !

After much googleing and faffing, i have managed to

• get my SIP softphone (VOIP) to connect to my asterisk box at home with out the use of a VPN
• Get RPC over HTTP email to work
• setup WEBDAV over SSL access to my file server

So I no longer need the VPN to do normal networky stuff to home, the only reason i need the VPN now is to trick Sky Anytime into thinking I am in the UK, and that is only the gui client, the peer to peer service does not give a stuff, so once i have requested the video, i can drop the VPN !

I am Glad i am NOT paying to the t-mobile WiFi usage !!

Well, its me again, sat in my hotel room in Seattle

due ti the fact i have NO Sci-Fi channel on the TV in my room, I thought i woudl re visit Sky Anytime, formerly known as Sky by Broadband

I??dont really like it because it is a peer to peer system and therefore a bandwidth hogger (waster if you hav to pay for it)
but he i am deperate for some decent TV, non o fthe jerry springer format stuff, which is all yoiu sem to get on network TV in Seattle

Attempt 1, Based on you IP address you are not in the UK, SOD OFF
Attempt 2, VPN to home, sorted donload starts, but how slow, competrting for bandwitdh on the 256Kb/s side of the ADSL
Attempt 3, VPN to a mates office, he has 1.5 Meg SDSL??

SORTED, still slow, but at least i get to download and watch some decent TV

After Many months of using windows (IIS) based blogware and never really being happy with the look and feel I thought it was time to look at alternatives.? A few of my friends and collegues rave about open source and LAMP? and having just built my first LAMP Wiki, HTTP://how-to-build-an-intranet.com, I thought? i would look at LAMP blogware

The Piglet blog uses wordpress, so i figured that would be a good place to start.
So i downloaded it, read the install docs, and here we are. This blog is now running on a Debian based LAMP platform

What more can i say !!!!!!!!!!!