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Just starting out as a network engineering student and I was going to post this on the network engineering stack exchange but thought I would try here first. So I'm looking for some advice in terms of diagnosing a particularly slow Wireless network.

So firstly we have an office of about 20 people, half use wired LAN connections but the other half use wireless. The wireless users are having an issue where when more than 2 or 3 are connected at a time their internet connection speed tanks and they cant get anything done online. I have checked the wired LAN speed and those machines don't have the same issue so it seems to be just an issue with the wireless.

The office has a draytech vigor 2820n and what appears to be a wireless range extender of unknown branding. Looking at the settings on the draytech I can see that under the WLAN settings tab wireless has not been enabled and so to my knowledge it should not be broadcasting the wireless ssid. Despite this we can connect to the wireless network so would the extender/accesspoint be the device which we are actually connecting to or could devices still be connecting to the draytech? Could this access point be a bottleneck resulting in the slow wireless speed?

I have checked with our isp and we are getting our advertised speed. Connecting my laptop directly to a LAN port on the draytech my speed if fine. There are no other wireless networks on the same channel that I can see being broadcast, in fact there is only 1 other wireless network that I can see being broadcast in that area. All staff are in one open workspace and so are in close proximity to both the router and the extender.

Can anyone give me some tips on something to try from here or what the next troubleshooting steps would be, the wireless being disable on the main wireless router looks pretty suspicious to me. Thanks in advance for any help you can provide.

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  • do you use 2.4ghz 5ghz ? try 5 if not already set what is also possible is that speed is cut down because a lot of people try to load stuff at the same time so the bandwidth gets split up among the active connections. what speed do you get from isp?
    – Master Azazel
    Commented Jun 1, 2017 at 9:24
  • it all runs on the 2.4ghz band at the moment, we get 30mbps up and down from our isp, which isnt amazing but considering wired LAN connections don't seem to be affected but he slow down i reasoned that it shouldn't be the issue here.
    – Alex B
    Commented Jun 1, 2017 at 13:38

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I would suggest that you make the move to 5GHz if at all possible. You have 23 channels you can use in that frequency. If you cannot make the switch to 5GHz and you must remain on 2.4GHz, make sure you don't have all your APs sharing the same channel. In 2.4GHz, you only have 3 (non-overlapping) channels (1, 6, 11). Make sure you do not use the channels in-between 1, 6 and 11. Spread those channel as far as you can. This should take some pain away. Next - You need to make sure that you have good coverage throughout your deployment. The cheap solution is to walk around with a MacBook and at every point around your facility - Hold the Option Key and click on the wireless icon. This will give you tons of data as well as the signal strength. I would recommend you have all your users at -70dBm and below for best performance. If your signal is above -70dBm, your performance will get affected. For the more expensive (and enterprise) solution, you'll need visiwave or airmagnet. These tools are make to ensure that you have proper coverage and performance for your users. Hope this helps... Let me know if you have any further questions.

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  • I would like to correct the following line: I would recommend you have all your users between -50dBm and -70dBm for best performance. If your signal is between -70dBm and -90dBm, your performance will get affected negatively.
    – pythonian
    Commented Jun 13, 2017 at 16:50

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