WiFi mystery

I run inSSIDer from time to time to see what WiFi channels are in use locally. It’s a rural area so if I see more that 3 or 4 routers (WAP’s) that’s unusual. Recently I’ve seen two very strong signals on Channel 6, with no SSID’s, and bogus MAC addresses - at least the manufacturer code isn’t in the official list.

The signal is something like 20 dBm stronger than my router which is about 30 feet away. There are no other properties within 600 feet so these boxes must be pumping out an illegal amount of power, whatever they are.

Guess I need to take the laptop for a drive around the neighborhood :wink:

I had something similar - a very strong signal showing up as on the same channel as my router.
It had me scratching my head for some time until I discovered it was due to “guest mode” being active on the Chromecast I had recently purchased and the signal disappeared when I turned off that guest mode.

Mine also turns out to be a local problem.

Following the classic “what changed” technique I figured out that the culprits are the recently activated Zigbee radios in my smart meter and power monitor box :onfire: I didn’t know that Zigbee channels use the same frequency range as the common WiFi channels :roll: Seem to me that the utility was not very smart to put their radios on a channel that conflicts with (commonly used IME) WiFi channel 6.

Anyway mystery solved :smiley:

Beam me up Scotty!

British Gas smart meters here in the UK dont have this issue, i just checked :wink: :smiley:

So I changed WiFi channels to avoid the zigbees, and the strong signals followed me. So much for that theory :roll:

The real culprits appear to be Amazon Fire Sticks. I thought the wireless remotes were bluetooth, but they are actually WiFi Direct. For whatever reason the system is designed so that the WiFi Direct access point in the Fire Stick operates on the same channel as the local WiFi network :? This can lead to connectivity issues like this guy’s when the network signal is weak. I don’t have enough incoming bandwidth to worry about WiFi speed, but it must be having an impact.