Recently, I’ve been experiencing some really strange problems with my laptop’s wireless connection to the office network. At home everything works like a charm, but my attempts of getting connected in the office were becoming harder and harder. Sometimes I’d get online instantly. At other times I’ll try for a couple of hours and than it works. Yet some other days I won’t get any connection at all. No matter how hard I try.
After talking to a few people “who know things” the solution has been found. The problem, it turns out, appears in the busy WiFi environments, with several access points. Each access point has its own channel. You can either specify the channel manually, or rely on the automagic.
The automagic thing mostly works, but if it doesn’t, try choosing the channel manually. In Linux, it is done by executing the following command on the command line:
iwconfig eth0 channel 1
In the example above, I am selecting channel 1 for my wireless device eth0. If you want to try another channel, or apply the command to a different interface, just change the appropriate arguments.
It was so simple after all…
