Home Wireless: Problems With Wifi

Video Transcript

"Hi. My name is David Bradshaw. We're talking about the distribution of wireless video content around the home. I want to talk for a moment about some of the difficulties posed by this technology. We're talking about Wi-Fi technology; use of 802.11N in this case and there are some limitations to the technology that you should be aware of. For example, the number of walls through which it can transmit, often can cause difficulty. We're right now, sitting in a three story home. My Wi-Fi router is actually in the basement. The PC is here and the device I want these two devices to talk to is actually going to be in the room upstairs. So, that means that the PC has to transmit wirelessly down to the router, through a floor that way, and the router needs to go through this floor and back up through that floor and back through a couple of walls, to get to the Media Extender upstairs. That can have an impact on the amount of bandwidth that is available to you. So, it's very important, as you're setting up your home network, to understand where those limitations are and make sure that you're designing your network appropriately. It's also possible to get interference from other devices in the home. Since Wi-Fi runs on a piece of the wireless spectrum that's also occupied by other devices like; microwave ovens and some hand-held phones around the home. So, it's important to make sure you're accommodating for those types of interference. A very easy way to do that is to make sure you're using some dual-band wireless capability, that runs both in the 2.4GHz spectrum and also in the 5.2GHz spectrum. Most of the interference is in 2.4, so if you're using dual-band, make sure you're transmitting the wireless content on the 5.2GHz bandwidth in order to avoid as much of that interference as possible."