PocketMatrix

On occasion someone in a nearby dorm room sets up a WiFi router. On this rare occasion my own router's wifi capability, which I rely on, behaves irradically. I have changed the signal pulse to a different time frame, I've changed the channel, I've added WEP, I've added MAC, I've decreased power, increased power, and play around with a ton of settings.

Does anyone know why another WiFi network would cause so much hampering to my own and how I could go about resolving the problem on my end?

Added MAC? How can you add MAC?

Mabye you should shut yours off and leach off of theirs?

It won't let me connect to theirs for some reason, I guess they have MAC on, too. But theres is across a field and through stone walls, mine is sitting on top of my mini fridge 4 feet away.

I just thought that WiFi networks were designed to not interfere with each other.
And I just looked in the logs, looks like someone has been logging onto my WiFi, too. I've closed it up so it's all good, but still it's not too great a situation.

You have to change to a channel that is far enough away from theirs. IE: If they use channel 6, you should change to 1 or 11. Those are the channels commonly used for multiple networks so they will not overlap. You should be able to find out their channel with netsniffer. otherwise just drop by and ask. you could always try to get them to use, lets say, 1, while you go for 11. it'd be worth a try, i am sure they wouldnt mind!

You "turned MAC on"? A MAC address is a unique hardware identifier every piece of network equipment has. It's to stop things going really tits up if there's an IP address conflict. You can't turn it on or off.

You can, however, restrict access to named MAC addresses which is what I do for security. It also ensures my PC with a printer is always assigned 192.168.1.2 for example. You could try asking nicely to leach off theirs. They probably wouldn't mind provided you agree to share your no doubt large and elaborate music / video / pornography collection.

Ahem. At school they only have WiFi over about 3.7% of the site, so most of the other time I use the WiFi connection of an IT company next door. I just wandered over, explained the situation, and they gave me all the info I needed. And they have a 2MBit leased line. Which I get practically all to myself

*sigh* I'm sorry I was too lazy to type in Unique MAC Deny restriction filtering followed by the MAC address of every device within 500 yards of me. Give it a break, you're not smarter then everyone else because I shortened something that everyone knows ... which is exactly what it is, something that everyone knows. Conversations are not a competition.