Neighbour manages to pollute the 2.4 ghz spectrum with his 120 IoT devices (opens in new tab)

Why are your first two links just about buildings looking the same? I was thinking they'd spectrum visualizations per your lead-in which would be really fascinating to see...

I chuckle when Americans say that their "5 over 1" buildings "all look the same". This is nowhere near the level of sameness that I'm accustomed to see here in Eastern Europe. To my eye, these buildings look very distinct from each other.

I clicked on those links to see Spectrum Analyser noise floor plots and was sorely disappointed.

Run Ethernet for everything you care about; problem solved.

If only wired ethernet was considered standard wiring like coax and power outlets, and installed during construction.

I did my undergrad in Seattle and had this issue. I eventually made 10 or so unprotected wifi printers spit out the "how to turn off wifi printing" page of their manuals. Definitely cleared up a bit of 2.4ghz room.

I wonder if future apts buildings will build RF blocking mesh in to the roof and floors and then have a phone signal repeater in each room.

Interesting reading. The results, and the issues with housing, remind one of the post war building boom in Central Europe, Communist enforced 'blocks'. We would visit from Canada and marvel how everything was the same. Obviously a very efficient use of planning and construction. Almost assembly line. Actually impressive how many people they had to house, quickly. The amount of design work that went into the community was more impressive. Years later, I could appreciate how everything was coordinated to have nearby playgrounds - so that you could watch your kids from your apartment. Schools, grocery stores, medical clinics, were all nearby in a logical efficient pattern. ( Communist system though, meant there was little to eat, or buy, or drugs, in those facilities.) The wiring, (and plumbing) was all prebuilt into the concrete walls and floors, ready to be connected, upon assembly. The ideas and designs were great. Of course, the actually performance, and construction, were prone to the usual Communist era woes of graft, theft, and shortages. To get back to the topic, phone wires were installed, but phones were not available for another 20 years. Imagine if Ethernet wiring was installed that way?

They propagate signal about as well as they propagate fire

You should post this on devrant [0]

[0] https://devrant.com - "Share and bond over successes and frustrations with code, tech and life as a programmer"

> Secondly: they take pushing their app to an insane level: none of the links works, they all point to 'Get the app'.

I agree. Its “use our app”-push is similar to Twitter or Instagram, but these platforms offer a lot of functionality in their apps. Devrant on the other hand, seems to be quite simple in functionality. Why would I need to download an app for that?

It doesn't scroll on an Android Galaxy Tab either.

> I've seen people tell me to get a 5GHz capable AP and a dongle. But this shouldn't be needed.

You can't have the cake and eat it too: 2.4 GHz propagates through walls, so you share the spectrum with your neighbors; 5 GHz is much more easily blocked by walls, but that also means you have the (much larger) spectrum to yourself.

> 5GHz doesn't go that far, so I'd need to buy an AP for pretty much every room.

Well, for every room that you need a stable connection in. If you can see your neighbor's signals that well through (presumably) multiple walls, I suspect that you'll also be able to cover at least one extra room per 5 GHz AP so that calls don't drop while you're moving between rooms.

> I've seen people tell me to get a 5GHz capable AP and a dongle. But this shouldn't be needed.

And yet, it sure sounds like it is! If your neighbor won't change the situation, and your outcomes are entirely dependent on them or you doing so, then you're left with taking an action that you normally wouldn't have to.

Or, depending on your needs, perhaps you can use Powerline adapters to some rooms.

As someone who works in a physics lab, I offer you the piece of advice that all physics labs go to first: try wrapping it in foil.

> get a 5GHz capable AP and a dongle. But this shouldn't be needed

Don’t think you’ve got much of a choice if you value your sanity.

You could also try powerline adapters in combination with 5ghz

De-auth until they get the picture: good luck fox hunting for whoever is emitting these frames.

Kind curious; you have obviously talked to the neighbor. What's their attitude? Do they just not care about the problems that are causing you and others?

Consider moving to 5GHz and installing a few metal reflectors/surfaces to direct the signal that comes though doorways and other openings about the house. If your ceilings are plaster you might be able to get up in the roof space and set up a bunch of reflectors to direct the energy though the ceilings and over the tops of the walls. The total cost could be a roll of aluminum foil, as used in cooking.

Mikrotik, has great support for mesh networks and managing multiple AP, if you want to go that route. (and combine 2g with 5g)

Another route might be using ethernet over power lines, and then have 5g points in rooms that need it.

But essentially , everywhere I need to do things that require bandwidth, I just pull 1gb ethernet cable. Sure it's not as convenient, and pulling cables is a pain, but once you do those things it just works.

Personally, I use a combination of wireless and physical cables. Not necessarily the most elegant solution, but it works.

Wireless has been great for a while, but I found it does not scale the way I would like it to, especially given the explosion of wireless devices out there.

> And just saying "Would you stop using all this smarthome junk so we can have a decently working wifi" also isn't really gonna cut it for them.

then fuck em, pwn their network.

That's kind of surprising, actually, I'd expect a bunch of techy types to be running their own routers or at least to have manually configured their router. At least, assuming everyone in the building has Comcast as an ISP, I'd expect the number of xfinitywifi APs to be inversely related to the number of Comcast employees who live there.

Not everyone can use 5Ghz - if you have one of those 50s/60s/70s houses that were build with plaster/chicken wire (rather than lath&plaster or drywall) then at 5GHz you're basically living in a bunch of faraday cages

(at a company I used to work at we once had to abandon a 5GHz product when we discovered that an appreciable numbers of customers would take it home and not be able to make it work reliably - it would have been a support nightmare)

Talk to your neighbor!?! What is this 1950?

I have maybe around 100 ESP32s. Sensors, bulbs, switches, power monitors, etc.

If someone came at me with a deauth attack I would be incredibly amused and probably make a new friend.

I can't imagine it's the high number of (IoT) clients that is the problem - it is the high power that the AP's use that causes the issue.

WiFi goes two ways - the AP talks to the client, and the client has to talk back. Clients don't have the high transmitting power that an AP has, and actually the AP won't need this high power. After all, if you use a bullhorn to reach your backyard, but the guy over there can't talk back, there is still no communication.

The solution would be to set the AP's to a lower transmitting power, enough to cover the house but not the street.

> I have over 80 IOT devices

This is a lot to ask, but.. what are all those things?! (My house has 0..I think)

What I got from this article was "Person using WiFi complains about another person using WiFi".

I agree with your sentiment. It requires communication. De-authing is not going to solve the problem just make enemies if they work out what the OP is doing.

Well, if you talk to them first and negotiations break down, they'll immediately suspect you if you start a deauth attack :D

If you want to run your own IoT devices then you're largely stuck in the 2.5 ghz range.

I'd like to know what 120-ish devices they're running. That's a lot of devices.

How many channels are there on 5ghz?

To me, the problems seem to be those devices use too many channels, continously?

I recently tried checking some TPMS sensors that I bought with rtl_433 and was amazed by how many sensors can get along just fine in my 10 story appartment buiding, but those messages are really short and only transmitted once every couple of minutes.

> that supports decent 5ghz range

What does that gain exactly? The 5ghz band is so crowded around my apartment that most devices can't connect at all. Is there some fundamental reason it should work better?

also no, you use 5ghz, its shit

The mad scientist in me says to use a microwave magnetron pointing at the neighbor's house to fry all their 2.4 GHz stuff.. Could that work in principle?

On the other hand, somebody so uninformed on the fundamentals of half-duplex wifi that they would choose to use mesh network extenders everywhere all on the same channel, is a person that I would rate as highly unlikely to listen to a logically reasoned technical explanation.

We're currently running into the same problem now with 6E as we had with 5Ghz.

All of those dinky cheap shit little IoT devices DON'T USE IT. They're all on 2.4Ghz.

5Ghz promised more spectrum and more usability and mostly gave that to us. Not quite as good range but it's great... IF we replaced everything we had that used 2.4Ghz.

We're still waiting for legacy devices to die... and new devices to stop using 2.4Ghz before that can happen.

And now you're suggesting 6E? Gonna take a while.

If a neighbour asks you to turn off half your devices indefinitely so their network works better, what exactly are you supposed to do?

I've had similar problems in my neighbourhood, I can't honestly find out who it is.. i kinda know the direction, and have tried talking to each of the units and everyone denies it is them.

Yeah, I don't think I'd know if I were doing this. I really don't think I am, but default settings and shitty proprietary IoT devices make me unsure...

And lose the chance to rant about it on the Internet?!

If he does this, and the neighbor decides not to do anything, OP can’t run de-auth attacks later on to free up the network, or he will be immediately suspect.

The only sure fire way to solve this is de-auth.

That might work, but also, it's possible 120 devices is simply too many for one person to be using in an apartment complex. Wireless spectrum is a shared resource, it's not okay to hog it.

If not 120, imagine someone with 200 or 1000 devices. At some point you've eaten more than your quota of spectrum and you owe it to your neighbors to stop hoarding IOT devices.

Edit: heh, not believing in scarce resources is peak Orange Site.

I doubt this would get anywhere. Usage of the spectrum as designed is not "interfering", and fairness at the physical layer/medium access level works at the per-device, not the per-household or per-person level.

There isn't even a requirement for "802.11-like fairness" on 2.4 GHz, which makes legacy analog wireless headphones that blast the entire spectrum without any listen-before-send policy as legitimate to use as a state of the art 802.11ax device.

I wonder if a dedicated "Wi-Fi only" chunk of spectrum would make sense, but it's not like such rules couldn't be bent by having multiple access points and spreading traffic over these as well.

1. Copper is expensive

2. This would block your cell phone signal

In Europe we have internet providers who 'helpfully' send you boxes you plug into your wall sockets and allow you to use your electrical infra as network cables. Lovely concept, you don't have to run your own network cables.

Ofcourse proper network cables are twisted in pairs and shielded for a reason: so no signal gets in, but also next to none comes out. All the copper in your house essentially acts as one big antenna if you use these powerline communication boxes. You would not believe what the spectrum looks like next to one of these houses. Ask any HAM operator, they have a deeply rooted hate against these things.

Thank goodness they seem to die out slowly since powerline communications doesn't seem to be able to keep up with increasing broadband speeds. As it turns out you need proper network cables to get halfway decent speeds.

Do you really want your sink leakage sensor be connected to mains?

Or infrared with radio connected repeaters.

I actually tried coordinating an effort like this with my neighbors when I lived in an apartment complex. That effort very quickly died, for most neighbors not knowing much about their wifi other than that the box with blinking lights made the Internet go, and not a single stock firmware I encountered exposing a TX power setting anywhere in the configuration interface.

Hopefully someone with that much kit would be the kind enthusiast who'd be running firmware that allows you to turn TX power below 100%, but it could just as likely be someone who really likes being able to set their light bulb color from their iPhone.

I put up an AP at the other end of my apartment from where my router sits, chose non-overlapping 5GHz channels with no interference from neighbors, tuned the transmit power so the signal level from each sits at around -60dBm where they overlap, and got everything 2.4GHz-only either wired with ethernet or replaced.

Now I just wish my neighbors would do the same, but I am not going to be the one to suggest it. If I fix up their networking, I will forever be on the hook if anything goes wrong or they face intermittent outages. Been there, done that, didn't even get a t-shirt. Unpaid network janitor is not something I need to add to my resume.

Perhaps one could make work as a network tech for home users, but I feel like people either don't want to pay for it, or don't care because it's "good enough".

> ... to turn the TX power wayyy down

Exactly! That's what it was supposed to be. A wifi-neighborly approach - have your local coverage at minimum needed power and with lower pollution. Except that all wifi-devices would be factory configured at increasingly higher 'medium' power setting.

I had fun with just the worst case scenario - 20m away is a glass condo tower right in front of my windows (the list of loud networks is endless), 100m away is a cell-tower. The RF interference from the cell tower so bad across all bands that I could hear it even in radio speakers. Yet, I still get steady browsing speads over my wifi (loud it is), just not practical NAS speeds, so wire does it.

On the contrary, turn 2.4 way up, and only use one channel on one AP, not mesh. Then 3 homes can co-exist.

By contrast, for 5 GHz, turn it to minimum and use one AP per room with wired (Ethernet or MOCA not Powerline) backhaul, and ideally APs with smart DFS.

Yeah this is what I do. I have 3 WiFi aps and obviously they are on different channels (though one of these is 5ghz only). But I have the power set to minimum. This actually helps proper roaming around the house.

Many ISP provided modems (with built in WiFi) don't let you control this setting.

Zero traffic networks do put a bunch of congestion load on the network, because the various Auth/advert frames are transmitted at 1Mbps with very legacy modulation and framing. That ends up using a lot of channel time.

How is it inferior? Seems better in most ways to me.

* 800-900 MHz only

* every z-wave device works with every z-wave controller

* z-wave signals travel further

* z-wave requires aes-128

* power consumption is roughly the same as zigbee

* z-wave is an open standard contrary to what you say

It is "open" now. Except the certification process is centralized which gives better ux compared to zigbee

http://embedded-computing.com/articles/z-wave-opens-up-as-sm...

You may want to consider mqtt-based devices like tasmota or shelly, if you prefer off-the-shelf products.

I have a few dozen stock shellies in my apt., all controlled via mqtt. All of them are disconnected from the internet. Works well.

From a theoretical perspective, using double the bandwidth and half the transmittion time causes the same congestion, as long as everyone is using the same strategy.

What's really baffling is how this is a problem if he just wants to use his laptop or something? Like 5ghz is everywhere these days.

Good idea, but 5Ghz doesn't work for many building materials. I had to go back to 2.4 to get reception further than 1 meter from the AP.

It definatley helps if you have space/property. If you live in a relatively close density (apartment, zero lot line homes) it very well may not.

I have some rtsp cameras. To keep them from being dumb and randomly roaming to like aps (and overloading the antennas and causing breakups in the stream)I setup different SSIDs on each ap for them so I can control what ap the cameras use and prevent bad roaming decisions.

This also means I have an SSID on each non overlapping 2.4 GHz channel.

However I live on a couple acres. If I’m interfering you are trespassing.

I probably would take a different approach on a higher density area, such as getting an AP with 2 dual-port, dual-polarity antennas dedicated to 2.4GHz and sticking them all on the same AP dedicated to the task, also assuming i would need to cover fewer doors and RSSI wouldnt be an issue.

If you want to be a good neighbor, disable support for "legacy" rates in your access points. The periodic beacon frames are transmitted at the slowest supported rate so that the least capable client devices can receive them. For 802.11b, that means something like 1Mbps. At such a low rate, the beacon frames consume a non-trivial amount of bandwidth. Each access point you see could be consuming over 3% of the channel. Turning off 802.11b/g support (if you can) will significantly reduce the cost of each access point broadcasting. If you're really nice you could decrease the frequency of beacons, but that's not really worth it due to buggy clients sometimes not coping well.

The channels around my house are so busy that in order to make wifi reliable, I have three access points, each one on its own non-overlapping 20Mhz 2.4Ghz channel. Two of them listen in on 80Mhz 5.8Ghz as well. I have them all set to the same SSID, so that my devices just choose whatever they think has the best signal strength. I also ran cat6 to my TV and desktop so that they don't need to go over wifi. I disabled 802.11b/g on all but one of them to keep the amount of overhead down from all the beacon frames.

This is why the Comcast SSIDs everywhere are so annoying. They make the spectrum tangibly worse just by existing. Same thing for wifi printers that broadcast their own AP. Something like 30 APs sending beacon frames is enough to completely trash 20Mhz of 2.4Ghz.

I wonder how effective ICF construction is in blocking signals (both incoming and outgoing)? With the high price of lumber right now, maybe more people will opt for ICF which might help with this problem if enough people adopt it.

Its more or less fixed when wifi 6E is rolled out. That gives a massive amount of spectrum.

I assume you're walking the walk with your edge network flip phone, right?

Because there's a shitload of cheap surplus 2.4 GHz parts in stock now that everyone wants 5 GHz capability?

Also, many people have really, really crappy routers, walls that 5 GHz signals have issues penetrating, and so on.

Yes.

1) 5GHz modules are more expensive.

2) 2.4GHz has channels 1 - 11 globally, with 12 and 13 in some countries.

5GHz only has channels 32 - 48 globally. Depending on country of distribution it then can support other channels too, but which channels are legal varies significantly. To support those, you need to know which regulatory area you are distributing to. So - additionally to HW being more expensive, you have to have different SKU for different regulatory areas, meaning production runs of different hw - more costs added. Limiting yourself to channels 32 - 48 to claim 5GHz compatibility will just cause you support pain & public image when people will complain your device does not really work with 5GHz.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_WLAN_channels#5_GHz_(8...

IoT devices (except something like NVR cameras) uses very little bandwidth and little time, so why you need 5GHz?

2.4GHz is better for range, all AP/Client supports same frequency on worldwide, cheap, and so on. I suspect that there are few reason to implement both 5GHz and 2.4GHz for IoT devices. Supporting all 5GHz band would increase cost.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_WLAN_channels#5_GHz_(8...

Because ESP8266 and ESP32 chips are really cheap, and they only do 2.4GHz.

Deliberately jamming the channel is an FCC violation. The FCC is very effective at coming down like a ton of bricks on people who mess with the spectrum.

I wire every device I can, but I still end up with more devices on wifi. Just the phones and tablets outnumber the computers and TV already.

And just run ethernet to USB adapter cables to every place you use your phone? The author says they wire what they can, but they want WiFi for the laptop and phone.