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Forum Discussion
How i fixed my Orbi Wifi woes
I turned off my Hue lights (and bridge). My frequent disconnects between router and and satellite have ceased and my wifi conections from iOS devices have become rock solid. All i need to do now is...
The dB scale is logarithmic, so even a small difference can be significant. A difference of 3 dB is equal to 200%. The difference between -80 dB and -96 dB (i.e. 16 dB) is almost 40000%.
TheEther wrote:The dB scale is logarithmic, so even a small difference can be significant. A difference of 3 dB is equal to 200%. The difference between -80 dB and -96 dB (i.e. 16 dB) is almost 40000%.
Thanks, very helpful! What's really odd to me is that I just hooked up the old soundbar again to see if I could observe any noticeable difference in noise level, and I could not. With the soundbar off, noise levels on channel 36 would stay at -89, sometimes fluctuating to -90 or -88, and on rare occasions would monentarily spike to -80 or so (even got as high as -72 once). But throughput was still fine. As soon as a turned the soundbar on, throughput tanked badly, but there was no discernable effect on the indication of noise... behaved pretty much exactly as it did with the soundbar off. Turn the soundbar off, proper throughput is restored.
That tells me 2 things...
1) The noise indication is not necessarily a totally reliable source for troubleshooting, and
2) Something really weird seems to be going on here with the lower 5ghz channels (even with the soundbar removed, noise on these channels is subtantially higher, though throughput does not appear to be substantially affected)
I agree that noise level, alone, is not necessarily a good indicator of performance. Signal to noise ratio, however, should have a stronger correlation.
Another thing to keep in mind is that channel 36 is part of what is known as the U-NII-1 band (channels 36-48). If I am not mistaken, the maximum power allowed in this band is 50 mW. Contrast this with the U-NII-3 band (channels 149-165) where the maximum power allowed is 1 W or 20x greater. That's roughly the difference between a human speaking normally and very loudly.
TheEther wrote:I agree that noise level, alone, is not necessarily a good indicator of performance. Signal to noise ratio, however, should have a stronger correlation.
Another thing to keep in mind is that channel 36 is part of what is known as the U-NII-1 band (channels 36-48). If I am not mistaken, the maximum power allowed in this band is 50 mW. Contrast this with the U-NII-3 band (channels 149-165) where the maximum power allowed is 1 W or 20x greater. That's roughly the difference between a human speaking normally and very loudly.
I wish Netgear gave us the choice of the 5G channels. In my location the upper channels perform much better penetration wise than the lower ones.