Fix Harry's wifi

Background

A friend suffers from crappy wifi. I keep telling him that I'll fix it, but I haven't yet. We spend time talking or eating instead of poking at the wifi. Before I go over again, I want to have a streamlined process for diagnosing the problem with all the necessary tools pre-loaded on my laptop so I can look like a rock star.

So I'm practicing on our wifi and trying to make sure I've got all my tools together.

Wifi Analyzer for signal strength

At home I get a maximum signal of about -50 db from Portlandia when the phone is less than 5 feet from it. I get about -75 db from ahub which is one floor down from the phone.

Identify protocol

Standard android wifi settings page tells me link speed, security type, and IP.

• Portlandia: 54Mbps (802.11g)
• ahub: 36Mbps (mixed 802.11b+g)

Other possibilities are:

• 802.11n (2009) up to 150Mbps
• 802.11ac (2012) up to 866Mbps

measure ping time and packet loss with mtr

• on a wired network ping time is between 0.2 and 0.4ms
• across portlandia ping time between a desktop and a tablet is between 1.9 and 99ms. Average is 57ms.
• there is no measurable packet loss