Oh my goodness, I have seen the light…. and it burns.

I have been having a problem with my server at home losing internet connectivity over the Wireless LAN, causing my webpage to go down and making it so we can’t surf the internet when the LAN is not available… I finally figured out why it was doing so. (thanks to my wonderful wife that put up with my frusteration during the troubleshooting of this problem.)

We have a wireless router and two computers running off the Wireless LAN for some time now, but every evening, we would lose internet connectivity. We would have to repair the WLAN network card to reconnect to the router and, eventually, on to the internet. This was getting annoying since my webpage requires the internet connectivity… so we were playing our wireless playstation and noticed the internet was not available… hmm. I did some searching (after getting all mad because it wasn’t working… grr). I went to the manufacturer of our wireless controllers and found out that they run on the 2.4GHz band… same as our WIFI! (lets see how long it takes for the answer to come to you…….)

It turns out that the wireless controllers that we bought for our playstation were running on the same channel our wireless network was running on. The controllers (Nyko brand) were built with a “break through” technology for “ultimate gamining experinece.” After doing some research, that break through technology meant that the controllers would disable any interferring wireless devices on the same channel – including our wifi. So, to fix this, we changed the controllers to channel 1 (the lower side of the 2.4GHz band between 2401MHz and 2423MHz) and set our wifi access point to channel 11 (upper 2.4GHz band between 2451MHz and 2473MHz). This solved our problem and all is well in our house again! whew!