Wifi usually just works. In the past I haven’t had to worry much about performance as for home use things have always been bearable and at work it’s never been my job so I just file a bug report with the relevant people when things go wrong. But a few years ago I had some problems.
For my home network I got a free Wifi AP which wasn’t performing well.
My AP supported 802.11 modes b/g or g/n (b, g, and n are slow, medium, and fast speeds). I initially had the AP running in b/g mode because I had an 802.11b USB wifi device that I used. When I replaced that with one that did 802.11g I tried changing the AP to g/n mode but performance was even worse on my laptop (although quite good on phones) so I switched back.
For phones it appeared to work well giving 54Mb/s while on my laptop (a second hand Thinkpad X1 Carbon) it was giving 11Mb/s at best and often much less than that. The best demonstration of problems was to start transferring a large file while pinging a system on the LAN the AP was connected to. Usually it would give ping times of 1s or more, sometimes 5s+ ping times. While this was happening the “Invalid misc” count increased rapidly, often by more than 100 per second.
The results of Google searches suggest that “Invalid misc” is due to interference and recommend changing the channel. My AP had been on channel 1 which had performed poorly, channels 2-8 were ok, and channel 9 seemed reasonably good. As an aside trying all channels manually is not a good idea, it takes a lot of time and gives little useful data. After changing to channel 9 it still only gave about 500KB/s when transferring large files with ping times of about 100ms, but that’s a big improvement. I tried running “iwlist scanning” to scan the Wifi network for other APs, that showed that channel 1 was used a lot but didn’t make it clear what I should do other than that.
The next thing I tried was the Wifi Analyser app on Android [1] (which doesn’t work on my latest phone, I don’t know if it’s still being actively maintained, it will definitely work on older phones). That has a nice graph mode that shows which channels are used and how the frequencies spread and interfere with other channels. One thing I hadn’t realised before I looked at the graphs is that 802.11n uses 4 channels and interferes past that. If you have two 802.11n devices you don’t have much space left out of the 14 channels available. To make more space I configured the Wifi AP in my ADSL modem to 802.11b/g mode and assigned it a channel away from the others making 4 channels available with no interference.
After that iwconfig reported between 60 and 120Mb/s and I got consistent transfer rates over 1.5MB/s while ping times remained below 100ms.
The 5GHz frequency range is less congested. But at the time I didn’t feel like buying 5GHz equipment.
Since that time I had signed up with an ISP that had a good deal on a Wifi AP that had 5GHz. Now I have all my devices configured to use 5GHz or 2.4GHz depending on which they think is best. So there’s less devices on 2.4GHz and the AP is configured for “20MHz channel width” in the 2.4GHz range (which means 802.11b/g).
Conclusion
802.11n seems to be a bad idea unless you run the only AP in an area. In a suburban area you will have 3 other houses broadcasting in your area and 802.11n is bad for everyone. The worst case scenario would be one person using 802.11n and interfering with everyone else’s 802.11g and then having everyone else turn on 802.11n to try and make things faster.
5GHz is less congested as most people run old hardware. It also has a shorter range which has the upside of getting less interference from other people. I’m considering installing 5GHz APs at both ends of my house and configuring all my new devices to not use 2.4GHz.
Wifi spectrum analysis software is much better than manual testing of channels or trying to deduce things from the output if “iwlist scanning“.