Crowded Airwaves

Minor post about WiFi.

I had moved my computer to a room that is 20 feet away with three walls in between itself and my WiFi AP (a TP-Link EAP660 HD). Without an Ethernet connection (which it had before), I had to rely on WiFi to get a connection.

With the original 802.11ac card inside (spec’d to do 433Mbps), I only got 100Mbps. I thought maybe it was the card, I swapped it out with an 802.11ax card that could do 2.4Gbps. That didn’t help either. I figured it was just the walls and distance that were causing the issue and just lived with the slower speed.

Today, I was trying to clear some clutter from my desk. The one thing that I found that I could live without was the LG soundbar and wireless subwoofer hooked up to my computer. I don’t use the computer for music anymore and only watch the occasional YouTube video, so I could live with the somewhat crappy sound coming out of the speakers of the TCL 43S525. After I turned off and put away the soundbar and subwoofer, my WiFi link speeds went from 100Mbps to 1Gbps.

It looks like the soundbar and subwoofer were causing interference on the 5Ghz band. Fun.