How I can reduce Wi-Fi range ?

[Winterlight]

How I can reduce Wi-Fi range on Asus AX 5400 router ? I'm not sure but if I reduce Tx power adjustment to power saving that lowest what I can do it redcue Wi-Fi range ? I already set to lowest that but not see any range reduced on mobile still shows full Wi-Fi bars.

[Levent]

Lol "gaming" router in the wild. That just means you cant reduce the power output of your antenna low enough for your needs. Is there a particular reason for doing this?

[Winterlight]

3 minutes ago, Levent said:

Lol "gaming" router in the wild. That just means you cant reduce the power output of your antenna low enough for your needs. Is there a particular reason for doing this?

Yes I don't need that long Wi-Fi range. I want set Wi-Fi range that it would be enough for 2 apartment room only. Not entire building.

[itsabearcannon]

You do realize that just because your Wi-Fi might reach other parts of the building, it doesn't mean that other people can connect to it, right?

There's no harm in having your transmit power running at default, unless you're running a mesh network and you don't want your own access points interfering with each other.

[Winterlight]

2 minutes ago, itsabearcannon said:

You do realize that just because your Wi-Fi might reach other parts of the building, it doesn't mean that other people can connect to it, right?

There's no harm in having your transmit power running at default, unless you're running a mesh network and you don't want your own access points interfering with each other.

Ok  but Tx power adjustment lowring mean it reduce Wi-Fi range or not ? I have 4 option power saving, fair, balanced and preformance.

[itsabearcannon]

It does reduce range slightly, but that's not a concern if you only have the one router. Walls in an apartment building, especially older ones, will block a lot of the signal anyways.

 

Just set it to Performance and leave it be.

[SImoHayha]

32 minutes ago, Winterlight said:

Ok  but Tx power adjustment lowring mean it reduce Wi-Fi range or not ? I have 4 option power saving, fair, balanced and preformance.

There is really no point to this unless you're a multi-millionaire dollar company

If you have a solid password and disable any sorta WPS/PIN setup procedure you're basically golden and no one can access your wifi. It's better to just leave it alone on performance and get well performance.

[OhioYJ]

1 hour ago, Winterlight said:

Ok  but Tx power adjustment lowring mean it reduce Wi-Fi range or not ? I have 4 option power saving, fair, balanced and preformance.

Have you thought about experimenting with building a box to place over the router. You could use different types of materials to get the desired result?  

[Agall]

1 hour ago, Winterlight said:

Yes I don't need that long Wi-Fi range. I want set Wi-Fi range that it would be enough for 2 apartment room only. Not entire building.

Either lower the output strength or attenuate the signal at the walls. I could make jokes about lead paint, but someone might take that as serious advice.

 

Its hard enough to do it with a house's wifi signal, doing it in an apartment is futile, really. Unless you want to cover all your walls with shielding and get no cellular reception as a result.

[LIGISTX]

3 hours ago, Winterlight said:

Yes I don't need that long Wi-Fi range. I want set Wi-Fi range that it would be enough for 2 apartment room only. Not entire building.

Wifi signal will go a lot farther than you realize it will, it just won't go that far reliably. With a powerful enough receiving antenna properly tuned, you can "suck up" wireless signals MUCH farthen then you would imagine possible (miles.....). The difference there is, that signal is going to be extremely weak, and after a few hundread feet especially with walls in between, itll be more or less useless. All of this to say, changing a few settings in your consumer router don't really do anything useful for anyone.

 

The real reason is, why do you care to try and restrict the wifi singal? There is no practical reason to worry about trying to reduce how far the signal travels except attempting to be nicer to your neighbors so you cut down on wifi congestion a bit. Most people bring up this topic because they are worried about security... reducing the power will have 0 affect on wifi security because, again, wifi signals travel MUCH fater then you realize they do, and someone who has the sophistication ot break into wifi also has the sophistication to get an antenna in range of you devices, regarless of how good your physical seucirty is around said devices.

 

All this to say, its really a moot point. Wifi encryption is your defense from a security standpoint, nothing else is. Thankfully, WPA2 has no known exploits, so IF someone DID have an exploit, they probably are not wasting it on you...

[itsabearcannon]

1 hour ago, LIGISTX said:

Thankfully, WPA2 has no known exploits, so IF someone DID have an exploit, they probably are not wasting it on you...

https://www.krackattacks.com/

 

WPA2 has many severe exploits. Don't spread misinformation. WPA3 even has similar problems, the better solution is MAC whitelisting but even that's not secure given the widespread ability to spoof MAC addresses.

[LIGISTX]

1 hour ago, itsabearcannon said:

https://www.krackattacks.com/

 

WPA2 has many severe exploits. Don't spread misinformation. WPA3 even has similar problems, the better solution is MAC whitelisting but even that's not secure given the widespread ability to spoof MAC addresses.

Yo be fair, I hadn’t heard of this… but to my point after looking into it, it’s been patched on all major operating systems.

 

And to the larger point of the post, turning down your WiFi signal strength will not help against this in the slightest, nor is there really anything that can be done to protect against these sorts of attack besides make sure you use hardware and software that actually gets security patches… 

 

Everything is exploitable, understanding the potential attack vectors is the most important part. 

[E-waste]

On 1/18/2024 at 2:42 PM, Levent said:

Is there a particular reason for doing this?

 

On 1/18/2024 at 2:49 PM, itsabearcannon said:

You do realize that just because your Wi-Fi might reach other parts of the building, it doesn't mean that other people can connect to it, right?

There's no harm in having your transmit power running at default

Speaking of interference... I'll get that, but let me quote the other 10+ posts saying this is a useless idea

 

On 1/18/2024 at 2:53 PM, itsabearcannon said:

It does reduce range slightly, but that's not a concern if you only have the one router. Walls in an apartment building, especially older ones, will block a lot of the signal anyways.

 

On 1/18/2024 at 3:24 PM, SImoHayha said:

There is really no point to this unless you're a multi-millionaire dollar company

 

On 1/18/2024 at 3:24 PM, SImoHayha said:

It's better to just leave it alone on performance and get well performance.

OP already stated that the signal is just fine on lower power, so what is the point of a higher strength output, extending beyond where OP has stated range is wanted?

 

On 1/18/2024 at 4:01 PM, OhioYJ said:

Have you thought about experimenting with building a box to place over the router.

 

On 1/18/2024 at 5:52 PM, LIGISTX said:

changing a few settings in your consumer router don't really do anything useful for anyone.

 

The real reason is, why do you care to try and restrict the wifi singal? There is no practical reason to worry about trying to reduce how far the signal travels except attempting to be nicer to your neighbors so you cut down on wifi congestion a bit.

Exactly, but why mention this point and then nearly completely discredit it?  I don't understand.

 

So to all of you and whoever else reads this, especially when you are in somewhat weak to strong range of 20-30+ wifi networks, there is a high chance that all of them are having to switch channels from one another so that there is not interference.  To clarify, what I am really saying is airtime sharing, or channel yielding.  One access point must absolutely stop and wait for another access point to transfer some data, then the other one has a chance.  It could be that there is enough channels on 5 Ghz wifi that each one can be 4 channels apart from one another with no issue, but it is an absolute fact that many of those wifi routers are being forced off of a particular channel because they happen to be just close enough to a router, that, if both routers used the lowest possible transmission power, each could be on the same channel with no issue.

 

If the signal is weak enough, then this isn't an issue, but in my experience, that is somewhere around 150-175 feet away.  Wikipediosa says between -76 and -80db signal strength is near where a wireless-ac or wifi-5 network will not interfere with other networks.  I am completely guessing on the distance, and is not based on actual measurements

 

If there is a large group of apartments, such as 40 separate buildings in one area, and all 40 buildings have their own wifi, and all 40 wifi routers are all on full power, then all 40 networks are forced to collectively work out which channel to use.

 

Let's talk about exactly how many non-DFS, unrestricted wifi channels are allowed in the U.S.

 

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_WLAN_channels

 

5 Ghz wifi has channels ranging from 32 all the way to 177.  But you'll be shocked as to just how few of them are unrestricted.  I've included indoor signals, and it's not anywhere close to what I thought it was.  I thought there were over twenty or even thirty channels to use, going by using every four channels.

 

It's 13.  That's not going to take much to saturate, unless it is OK to use what the wikipedia chart refers to as "unsused".  What does that mean?  So let's include those too.

 

72-96 adds six more channels, for a grand total of 21.

 

So 21 free channels for 30-40 plus networks all in range of one another, not great.  If any one of those networks is within -75 dBm strength, according to the 802.11 standard, it MUST use a different channel.  If no other channels are free in the range of the access point, then the only other choice is for two access points on the same channel to share airtime.  This is called yielding.  One access point must completely stop transmission, give some amount of time to the other router on the same channel, then the other stops and yeilds a small amount of time.

 

So all this crap about how it is useless to change, just leave it full who cares, is not useful, or educational.  There will never be a good reason, ever, not even in an weather emergency, to have full power to your wifi transmitter in a small building.  It's causing (even on it's lowest setting in stock, limited firmware) other nearby networks to change channel, as well as causing much farther networks to also do the same.

 

Let's do some math.  40 networks, 21 free channels.  The ideal situation would be from 0-21 usable channels, 21 networks use the available channels.

 

Next, the other networks use channels 0-20 again.  Obviously this isn't likely to be how the channels are automatically choosen.  So, what channel spacing is eventually settled upon after all wifi routers have been deployed?  I'm sure there is some mathmatical way to figure it out.

 

So I can imagine a lot of auto channel switching as wifi access points are initially deployed.  But does it matter?  Let's assume there is channel interference, how many channels have to stop, and wait for other access points having to share a channel before it is clearly slowing down the networks?  It can't be just two access points having to share, as that might not be noticable unless you are doing a lot of audio or video upload.  So how much channel yielding (that is what I am referring to when I say interference) is too much to have a usable network for low-latency upload?

 

Wifi 7 is designed to solve this issue, but both wifi-5 and wifi-6 are so capable, that there isn't compelling reasons to upgrade, except for this channel yielding issue in dense wifi environments.  This can be mitigated by reducing transmitter power, which, if you all would actually test this, doesn't severely hinder performance at all.  It also helps all other wifi routers in, and now, out of your antennas range.  Win win for all networks, with absouletly zero possible drawbacks.  So why not just use the minimum setting?

 

To everyone who reads this with permission to change your wifi router settings, first, do a wireless scan and see just how many wifi networks you pick up from your router.

 

If you can get dBm ratings, write down how many of them are below 76 dBm signal strength.  Then, take a walk around your home, and see just how far your wifi travels out.  So when you leave your house, connect to your wifi, and see how far you get before you lose connection.  Oh, and do a speed test from a couple local devices inside.

 

After knowing that information, with permission, reduce the transmitter power to the lowest option the limited firmware settings allow, and perform another speed test.  Do another scan of wireless networks and write down how many -76+ dBm networks are available.  That's how many less networks have to compete or switch channels with yours.

[LIGISTX]

7 minutes ago, E-waste said:

So all this crap about how it is useless to change, just leave it full who cares, is not useful, or educational.  There will never be a good reason, ever, not even in a weather emergency, to have full power to your wifi transmitter in a small building.  It's causing (even on it's lowest setting in stock, limited firmware) other nearby networks to change channel, as well as causing much farther networks to also do the same.

Yes, there is a good reason to leave it alone… a lot of people don’t actually understand what they are doing, and they don’t understand what changing settings will do or how it will impact their network. The best advice is almost always just leave it at its default setting.

 

Wifi tuning is extremely complicated, and it can’t be done by random guessing. You need to evaluate the rf environment you are in, and tune each AP to that situation. 
 

Also…. The majority of time people ask about this, it’s because they are worried about WiFi security. So the default answer is typically just “this probably won’t fix what you want it to fix, so just leave it alone”. 
 

10 minutes ago, E-waste said:

To everyone who reads this with permission to change your wifi router settings, first, do a wireless scan and see just how many wifi networks you pick up from your router.

Or… just leave it all on auto unless you are having issues, and then you can try and excitement why and what is causing them. I wouldn’t advise people change settings without first understanding what they are doing. Wifi tuning is exceedingly complicated. 

[Levent]

Why am I even quoted in this scuffed introduction to wireless networks 101 medium article?
 

Why are you coming onto a 2 week old thread making a whole bunch of statements which also include “I don’t know” and don’t link actual reading material from 802.11 for the shit you are trying to convey. 

Reducing RF power of your router does NOT magically reduce interference caused by other routers.

 

That is precisely what everyone else here is saying. If you are managing an entire apartment complex sure it sure as shit makes heaps of sense, however not when default value of every single device around you is the maximum legal limit.

 

@E-waste

[E-waste]

2 hours ago, LIGISTX said:

Yes, there is a good reason to leave it alone… a lot of people don’t actually understand what they are doing, and they don’t understand what changing settings will do or how it will impact their network. The best advice is almost always just leave it at its default setting.

 

Wifi tuning is extremely complicated, and it can’t be done by random guessing.

 

2 hours ago, LIGISTX said:

Wifi tuning is exceedingly complicated.

I disagree.  I think this is quite a basic setting with a very obvious effect.  Laptops even have this setting, and I've seen that setting available on Windows for a long time.  How difficult can it be to understand two words?

 

Transmitter.  Well, if you don't know what that means, it's fine, just look it up in a dictionary.  I'd imagine at least 50% of people who see that word will understand it.

 

Then power.  100% of people know.

 

So transmission power... Hmm what could that possibly do?  Well, let's figure this out together.  A wireless router is plugged into power.  It also has an antenna that, surprisingly transmits signals.  And here is a setting to change the power of the transmitter.  This can't be complicated, I think you are over-thinking this.  I know that this reads very disrespectful or rude, but to make it seem like this is some advanced technical setting that most people should basically never change, yeah I don't agree.

 

1 hour ago, Levent said:

and don’t link actual reading material from 802.11 for the shit you are trying to convey. 

Reducing RF power of your router does NOT magically reduce interference caused by other routers.

 

That is precisely what everyone else here is saying. If you are managing an entire apartment complex sure it sure as shit makes heaps of sense

O.K. you want official techincal recommendations, I'll find them and link them.  This to me, seems like a completely commonsense setting.  I cannot believe the continued pushback in all but a single one of the posts in this thread, not including mine.  This is ridiculous!

 

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8584933

 

1 hour ago, Levent said:

it sure as shit makes heaps of sense, however not when default value of every single device around you is the maximum legal limit.

When I read this, I think you just said the opposite of your first point.  You said it makes sense for an apartment complex, but they say but NOT (as in, it does not make sense to manage the network?) when the default for devices is maximum antenna transmitter power.

 

There are only a few non-overlapping channels, and since existing wireless access points today and at least (hopefully longer) for the next several years, wireless-ac and ax devices will be used, access points must use a limited number of 5Ghz channels.

 

Since it is very undersirable to split airtime with other devices on the same channel, device in range of one another must pick between the 21 available channels, and working with all other in-range wireless routers, all negotiate on a channel that won't cause interference.  I would guess there is some formula or math that could work out which channel to use.  It would have to be in a way that, at the edges of an access points -76 dBm range, the channels in use are not going to be used by the next router that is at the "out of range" -77 to -80 dBm router.

 

Let's say the router at one edge of a network (router 0 for now) uses channel 32.  What needs to happen is that, out of the 40 wifi routers, let's say, the 21st router (if they were all in a row, horizontally, that's how I'm imagining it) needs to be able to start being able to use the channel that router 0 is on.

 

Router 21, in my imaginitive example, would be in the middle, and will be in range of at least 19 other wifi routers.

 

Edit:  I just realized in my example, that I'm thinking of the router in the middle only seeing all the routers to one side.  It would not be in contention with router 0 but rather, competing with routers 13 though router 30, out of the 40 routers in a row.  Router 0 would still have to pick a channel not in use by the 21st router, assuming it is out of range in the best-case senario.

 

Since there are at most, only 21 channels, it's not going to be easy to pick an unused channel in such a crowded environment, in fact I'd go as far to say it's 100% completely impossible unless more channels are opened up by FCC regulations, which would improve this situation immensely.  It doesn't bother me, and I'm not complaining or suggesting that more channels should be opened, because just reducing transmitter power is a very simple way to help solve this issue.

 

With "machine learning" what I would imagine is the network of access points that absolutely must negotiate channel selection with one another, would determine which access points are in more idle states.  If there is a wifi network, say during work hours, or night, that literally has zero traffic besides 10 beacons being transmitted per second, it could take channel / airtime preference until that router has a higher utilization.  Or, maybe it already does this when another network isn't transferring data.

 

This is 100% still a valid issue, and I'm not going to give into pressure with accusations "I don't know" what I'm talking about, or that this is "too complicated" for non-technical people, or that the "defaults are best".  Defaults are usually not great.

 

There is a reason they are called defaults.  Let's break it down.  De, meaning no or not.  Fault, an issue or error.  De-faults are a working setup, a starting place.  They are not recommendations, or necessarily the absolute best possible settings.

 

I also don't think that transmission power being on auto will likely ever change to anything less than maximum.  The default setting of maximum transmission power is set so that the manufacturer can claim a long range and print that on the box.  This is to convince the consumer that it is good, and a must-have feature.  I don't think most people need a wireless signal that extends 300 feet, and especially not in an apartment setting where even 50 feet may be a bit too far.

 

If the setting was actually designed to set in feet or meters, exactly how far the signal should go, I bet it would be even more understandable for non-technical users, and they'd be far more likely to change it if it had marketing on the product about it.

 

"New!  Configurable signal distance, down to 2 meter (6 feet) increments"

 

Would anyone care?  I hope so, because while wifi-7 is cool and the new channel interference/yielding improvements are nice, I don't want to think about all the circuit boards and plastic that would end up in the ground just for that improvement.

[Alex Atkin UK]

It doesn't hurt to turn it down (given you can just change it back), as long you test to make sure its not reducing the performance where you actually need it.

 

Typically radio amplifiers perform cleaner at lower power settings, so (in theory) it could improve performance if you still get a good clean signal everywhere you need it.

 

Importantly, "bars" on your phone is not a real indication of signal strength or quality, its only a very rough guide that doesn't practically mean anything at all.

[LIGISTX]

41 minutes ago, E-waste said:

So transmission power... Hmm what could that possibly do?  Well, let's figure this out together.  A wireless router is plugged into power.  It also has an antenna that, surprisingly transmits signals.  And here is a setting to change the power of the transmitter.  This can't be complicated, I think you are over-thinking this.  I know that this reads very disrespectful or rude, but to make it seem like this is some advanced technical setting that most people should basically never change, yeah I don't agree.

That… is entirely not how this works. It is EXTREMELY complicated. RF engineering is one of the most advanced applied physics we have as a human species. Does all of that advancement make it into your consumer router, and have exposed settings to alter said settings, no, probably not. But that doesn’t mean this it is not a complex problem.

 

If it was as simple as “plug into wall to receive AC power, turn power into WiFi signal, WiFi signal go brrrrr”. Sure. Then we can all understand what power means, and we can understand what transmitter means. But that is reducing this to such a basic level, it isn’t even worth talking about.

 

For most people… just leave it alone. Leaving it alone will be the best option. If you want to start deep diving WiFi, sure, but that’s a rabbit hole and a half. Actually understanding how it works, and being able to speak intelligently on the subject, well that’s at least 1 PhD away, preferably many…. CPU’s are fast because they have high clock speed. We all know what a clock is, and we know what speed is. I’ll be right back, I’m going to go design a CPU real quick… ghz go brrrrrrr.  

[LIGISTX]

2 hours ago, Levent said:

Why am I even quoted in this scuffed introduction to wireless networks 101 medium article?
 

Why are you coming onto a 2 week old thread making a whole bunch of statements which also include “I don’t know” and don’t link actual reading material from 802.11 for the shit you are trying to convey. 

Reducing RF power of your router does NOT magically reduce interference caused by other routers.

 

That is precisely what everyone else here is saying. If you are managing an entire apartment complex sure it sure as shit makes heaps of sense, however not when default value of every single device around you is the maximum legal limit.

 

@E-waste

….this

[LIGISTX]

50 minutes ago, E-waste said:

When I read this, I think you just said the opposite of your first point.  You said it makes sense for an apartment complex, but they say but NOT (as in, it does not make sense to manage the network?) when the default for devices is maximum antenna transmitter power.

It makes sense if you own the entire WiFi deployment for the building. Because then you can make impactful differences to the entire network. Singular users on their own won’t make a difference, and will likely just mess up their own WiFi experience.

 

I run a UniFi setup at home, and after about a year of trying to make things better, I reverted to all default settings as far an channels and power settings go, and everything got better as soon as I did that… and I’m a relatively well learned homelaber, who doesn’t mind digging into settings, watching hours of videos, reading literature and guides, forum diving and experimenting. Which I did…. All to come back to the recommendation of “just leave it at default, it’ll probably work better”. There are a few things I have tweaked, but not power, and not channel. I have 1 of my mesh nodes power adjusted, and that was after a week or so of tuning and trial and error to force devices to hop to another APat a very specific db. Most people………… are not going to want to deal with this. It was a massive PITA. 

[Alex Atkin UK]

Indeed the problem is if you can't control the transmit power of your neighbours, you can end up with their signal being stronger than yours so your performance tanks.

 

If you're on a clean channel with no other interference then sure, reducing the power might be okay, but that's going to be tricky in an apartment complex and downright impossible unless you are using DFS channels and/or 6Ghz.

 

Also as signal quality and strength will be worse even one room away, turning it down in the same room as the router can be fine but speed may drop off much quicker in another room, even in a small apartment.

 

In an ideal world for maximum performance we would have very low power WiFi Access Points in every single room and not let the signal spill from one room to another at all, but that would be expensive, complex and you can't force the neighbours to do it.

[Needfuldoer]

If you're running a network of managed APs, you want your transmit power set so the imaginary "bubbles of WiFi" coming out of them don't overlap too much. That way your client machines don't desperately cling to the weak signal of the first AP they connected to all the way across the building, instead of hopping to the one that's now directly overhead. (I think some systems let you set a minimum signal strength before it boots the client to another AP too.)

 

In a home environment, especially in a multi-family building, everyone should just leave their settings alone and let the routers figure it out. The average home user doesn't know anything about frequency bands, RF theory, or WiFi channels. If everyone starts messing with their settings, changing antennas, cranking the power up to "get a better signal", before you know it the WiFi bands will be embroiled in chaotic anarchy with everyone's equipment trying to scream over everybody else's equipment while it tries to scream over theirs.

 

It's easy to fall into a trap of over-thinking and buttonitis when you're presented with all kinds of technical-sounding controls to play with, but it's rarely needed in a residential setting.

[E-waste]

On 2/2/2024 at 6:13 AM, Needfuldoer said:

cranking the power up to "get a better signal"

I'm advocating strongly for the exact opposite.  To allow the signal not to be reachable by routers at the edges of the -76 to -80 dBm signal range.

 

On 2/2/2024 at 4:13 AM, Alex Atkin UK said:

and you can't force the neighbours to do it.

No, but sharing ideas and discussing this issue must only be a beneficial endevour, again, with zero drawbacks.  No one will be harmed in just changing this SINGLE setting to low, versus high or whatever auto does.

 

On 2/2/2024 at 4:13 AM, Alex Atkin UK said:

Also as signal quality and strength will be worse even one room away, turning it down in the same room as the router can be fine but speed may drop off much quicker in another room, even in a small apartment.

Have you ever tested this?

 

On 2/2/2024 at 4:13 AM, Alex Atkin UK said:

if you can't control the transmit power of your neighbours, you can end up with their signal being stronger than yours so your performance tanks.

Doesn't the channel division prevent this issue?  So that separate channels can operate without yielding / airtime sharing.  This is why mesh nodes use separate channels per node, I think the same idea applies.

 

On 2/1/2024 at 11:09 PM, LIGISTX said:

Singular users on their own won’t make a difference, and will likely just mess up their own WiFi experience.

How does reducing network range reduce the wifi experience?  The aboslute worst possible issue that this will EVER be capable of causing, is the wifi doesn't go as far as it used to.  Not a SINGLE other possible other issue is physically possible at the electromagnetic spectrum level, of ever occuring, from reduced antenna output.  If the signal doesn't go as far to reach some areas, the easiest thing to do is to set the output to medium instead of low.

 

This isn't rocket science.  We aren't discussing installing an operating system, or changing the wifi encryption protocol, dns settings or the beacon interval.

 

This is simply changing the transmitter power.  All responses so far have been in the range of it's some super advanced setting that most people should leave on full power.

 

On 2/1/2024 at 10:56 PM, LIGISTX said:

If it was as simple as “plug into wall to receive AC power, turn power into WiFi signal, WiFi signal go brrrrr”. Sure. Then we can all understand what power means, and we can understand what transmitter means. But that is reducing this to such a basic level, it isn’t even worth talking about.

It is that simple.  It is that basic, it is that easy to understand.  Without power, no wifi.  With too much power, the antenna with have distortion, or whatever it is techincally called.  Why are you intentionally making this so ridiculously confusing?  In basically every wifi router ever manufacturered, in every wifi router / access point firmware, and a large majority of pci-wifi and usb wifi cards, this setting has existed for well over a decade.  It has been an option, and it is clearly labeled.  It's incredibly annoying (and I can understand your point of view being the same) to see the responses make this setting to be the devil as if it's going to ruin your wifi.

 

All I'm trying to share is that in dense wifi areas, reducing wifi transmitter power, with 100% confidence, will only serve to benefit all wifi networks.  I strongly disagree that reducing wifi power will allow nearby, full powered network to interfere.  They will be in range because your, altough lower transmitter power, router, will NOT have it's reception lowered, which is only possible by replacing the antenna.

 

Because those higher powered networks are still in range, all that will happen is the same as it would be on full power.  I could see one scenerio where a full power wifi network is transmitting much stronger than your own, and so that network will be unable to reach yours by reception.  But even so, your wifi router will still choose a channel not in use by other wifi routers in range.  And because your router has less range, it doesn't have to literally negotiate with as many other wifi routers, because the signal output by your antenna will not reach as far.

 

Discussing this BASIC setting is like having a conversation with CTIA or the FCC.  Linus tech tips: don't change the defaults.

 

I understand you are all trying to save people the trouble of wifi issues, and I agree that's a great thing to do.  Conversely, I'm trying to do the same and give ideas on how to reduce how many wifi routers have to compete with one another and I really can't think of any serious issues that could arise from this.  If the range is now too low, set it to medium, this is definitely not complicated.  You have three or four options, low medium high auto.

 

I'm not advocating changing mulitple settings all at once, or changing maxumum transmit units, or guard interval, or beacon interval, or channel width.  I'm just discussing a single setting.  Just one.

 

If you have not tested

On 2/1/2024 at 10:58 PM, LIGISTX said:

….this

setting for your own wifi network I hope that I can encourage and convince you to give it a try and test performance.  In fact, with this much pushback I feel like making a thread specifically about transmitter power on wifi, both for access point and client devices (laptop pci cards and usb) to test performance and range difference and have a real informative, evidence-based discussion and I would be grateful if you all would test this and join the thread.

[LIGISTX]

58 minutes ago, E-waste said:

I'm advocating strongly for the exact opposite.  To allow the signal not to be reachable by routers at the edges of the -76 to -80 dBm signal range.

That isn’t how this works. Have you ever done a scan of nearby WiFi signals? -70 to -75 is where most devices will start to auto drop themselves due to assumed poor connection (pretty valid, at -75 you get pretty crap signal), you can detect thing way, way more faint than -80. When I do a scan of my rf environment with my UniFi AP’s, I see 40+ SSID’s and I don’t live in packed in apartments. You are “reachable” way, way beyond -80. You may not get a good experience and the router may auto drop you even if you force your device not to drop, but the signals are still reaching you. 
 

1 hour ago, E-waste said:

Have you ever tested this?

Yes. The AP in my garage is turned down and set to auto kick clients once they go above -62 iirc. This took a weekend of testing to get just right, but I wanted perfect coverage in my garage, but as soon as I leave my garage I wanted the AP to kick my device so it would jump back to the main AP since my garage AP is set up as a mesh. This means when I am in the garage, I do get working WiFi which I barely did before (without this AP I would get -70 to -74 db in my garage, which worked, but not well and did have intermittent disconnects). Garage is under my condo with thick concrete between them as a fire barrier… it took some tuning to get it just right. If I let my device linger on the garage AP while in my apt, they get horrible speed due to low signal + being on a meshed hop already. 
 

1 hour ago, E-waste said:

How does reducing network range reduce the wifi experience?  The aboslute worst possible issue that this will EVER be capable of causing, is the wifi doesn't go as far as it used to.  Not a SINGLE other possible other issue is physically possible at the electromagnetic spectrum level, of ever occuring, from reduced antenna output.  If the signal doesn't go as far to reach some areas, the easiest thing to do is to set the output to medium instead of low.

 

This isn't rocket science.  We aren't discussing installing an operating system, or changing the wifi encryption protocol, dns settings or the beacon interval.

 

This is simply changing the transmitter power.  All responses so far have been in the range of it's some super advanced setting that most people should leave on full power.

Reduce the distance means you’re reducing the power. Reducing the power means you will have a worse experience the farther from the signal you go…. The less the power the closer that edge is………….. this is actual rocket science. Actually, I would argue RF is more difficult than rocket science. Rocket science is relatively simple, RF engineering is one step away from black magic. 
 

1 hour ago, E-waste said:

They will be in range because your, altough lower transmitter power, router, will NOT have it's reception lowered, which is only possible by replacing the antenna.

Me thinks you have never actually tested this…. Because that’s not how this works. Antenna length dictates the wavelength the antenna best works with, but the power of the signal does, very dramatically, affect reception. Why do you think your phone can see your router from way far away, but you have a poor wifi experience? Your router is screaming way louder then your phone is because it has more power… so you can receive signals all day long, but if your phone can’t respond, well, technically you don’t have WiFi because if you can’t request anything from the router, being able to hear it is meaningless. The power does also affect the ability to receive, so don’t go using this as a reason to advise people to turn their WiFi settings down “because your device can’t even communicate with the router anyways”. Turning down the routers antenna power will reduce both of these distances. 
 

1 hour ago, E-waste said:

setting for your own wifi network I hope that I can encourage and convince you to give it a try and test performance.  In fact, with this much pushback I feel like making a thread specifically about transmitter power on wifi, both for access point and client devices (laptop pci cards and usb) to test performance and range difference and have a real informative, evidence-based discussion and I would be grateful if you all would test this and join the thread.

You haven’t actually read my responses have you. I have said multiple times, I have tuned my AP’s. I have spent literal days getting them just right, and after all of that, I ended up reverting many of the settings back to auto because RF environments are extremely dynamic, and I found my well tuned settings were not viable at all times of the day, likely depending on how many people are home nearby, but what REALLY changed things is when I hit new neighbors. They brought with them new devices and new routers, and the environment changed so drastically, I had to myself get another AP. At this point I just said forget it, set most settings back to auto except the specific garage AP settings I listed already. 
 

I am not speaking on this topic with 0 experience, I am speaking on this topic with enough experience to advise most people should just leave it alone. If they want to get into it more deeply, that’s great, but they would need to understand that takes actual work, actual learning, and a good bit of experimenting to get it tuned correctly. 

[LIGISTX]

Look. All of this, all of what we are trying to communicate is, for most people, just leave it alone. Obviously the single setting being exposed to you “is not rocket science”, just like saying “we use orbital mechanics to get rockets into space” is not actual rocket science. But the engineering that goes into doing those things is extremely complicated, and RF engineering is more complicated then rocket science… the single setting of “power” is a gross simplification of what is actually going on in the backend. 
 

Leaving things on auto, for most people, will result in a better overall experience. That is all we are trying to say.