All of them have pretty much sucked. Bad drivers, flaky connectivity, bad performance, increases in power usage (well, at least for the laptop ones where I could tell), and general all-around worthlessness. Their only advantage was that I didn’t have to plug an ethernet cable into my hardware – and let me tell you, that is nice – but the downsides often meant that it was easier to run a couple hundred feet of CAT5 than to actually get the wifi working.

I’m at my wit’s end. I have no idea why this s–t doesn’t work and I have no idea how to fix it. My near-inescapable conclusion at this point, after hassling with wireless internet for over 5 years and never having a good experience, is this:

Wireless internet is a waste of money and seems like a scam.

You spend a bunch of money buying wireless network equipment, spend your time configuring it, and then get unreliable performance. When you try and get support from network hardware vendors, you get screwed, because they rarely release firmware updates and their support phone lines (if they even have one) typically have extremely long hold times and require you to call when you should be at work trying to get things done.

Running CAT5 between commodity routers is cheaper, faster, and easier. The only downside, as far as I can tell, is that you can’t post to twitter from your toilet.

Well, maybe it’s your router.

I’ve owned half a dozen different routers, all from reputable brands with high average ratings on reseller sites and such. All of them have been pretty much equally terrible. I would love to blame individual brands but they all seem to suck equally, so there’s no point.

Well, maybe it’s your location.

I’ve had my WiFi equipment set up in 4 different residences, all in different locations – suburban, urban, rural, and in the most recent example, high-tech (I can get Google WiFi if I go to a park nearby. No idea how reliable it is…) No tangible difference in my experience with WiFi at any of those locations, though obviously intangible things like my Signal to Noise ratio varied.

Well, maybe you don’t know how to configure it?

Sure, I’m definitely not an expert. But I’ve put a lot of effort into it. I’ve tried various combinations of channels, transmit speeds, encryption configurations, and such on each WiFi access point I’ve owned. Some of those options made a tangible difference; for example, turning off encryption entirely (yes, entirely) reduced my average latency on my current router by 10-15ms, which was definitely worth it. I have to use VPN or SSL for any sensitive traffic now, but I was doing that already, so f–k WEP and f–k WPA.

But for the most part, none of that s–t did anything. I still get f–king packet loss when sending ping packets to a router that’s 50 feet away from me, and my transmit/recieve rates still randomly drop for no obvious reason, and I still occasionally have to hard-reset the settings on my router because it decides to stop accepting connections of any kind over wifi at the drop of a hat.

I could blame the devices I’m using to access my WiFi networks, but that doesn’t really work either. I’ve tried every possible driver setting and configuration change on my machines to see if it made a difference, and it didn’t. I’ve used multiple personal machines, along with machines from work, other people’s machines, and devices like an XBox 360 or iPhone. All of them get the same unpredictably terrible performance out of WiFi.

You just need better equipment!

I can buy that, really. But the two different places I’ve worked that had corporate WiFi networks have both suffered from the same reliability and performance issues with their WiFi that I have, despite professional operations/IT staff using those networks and putting their money and time into getting them to work. I don’t think it’s just about the equipment.

I’m convinced that it’s possible to construct a working, high-quality WiFi network – the one at Sun’s Executive Briefing Center is amazing, and I didn’t have any problems with it at the last SHDH – but I’ve seen more completely useless WiFi networks than I have successful ones, and even the useless ones are pretty expensive to set up and run.

Well, WiFi works great for me!

Really? Awesome! Please share some tips or suggestions, or perhaps point me to the hardware configuration you’re using. I’d love to try and reproduce your experience.

My current residence is one where it’s extremely difficult to run ethernet cables to my desktop and other hardware, so I’m kind of stuck with WiFi, which is what makes it so annoying. In most cases, I’d just run a cable and forget about it, like I ended up doing with all my previous WiFi hardware. No such luck here.

For those who feel like sharing their advice, here is a summary of my current configuration:

Netgear WNR834B wireless router, running in 54Mbps (G) mode. Located out in the open, up on a shelf. Line of sight to the machines I’m using is clear, with the exception of a floor between the router and my desktop. Plugged into a power socket it’s not sharing with anything other than my DSL modem.

Linksys WMP54G PCI adapter, in my desktop. No PCI IRQ conflicts or anything like that. Tried with both the included drivers and Windows XP’s built-in WiFi support. I have a high-quality wifi antenna attached to the adapter, sitting about 4 feet away from my desktop, positioned in order to get the best signal strength. The router is about 40 feet away, and as shown in the screenshots above, my SnR averages between 55dB and 70dB – full ‘signal strength’ in every graphical tool I’ve seen.

One other desktop is connected directly to the wireless router via a 60 foot long CAT5 cable that we ran out a window, off the patio, and in another window to connect to the router downstairs, as an experiment. It has no connectivity issues whatsoever, despite the fact that the ethernet cable is outside.