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Ask HN: Why don't smart routers use phones to callibrate?

1 points by sammorrowdrums ↗ HN
I've had several band switching and high powered routers, but the problem is that they can't see the whole problem.

Switching channel based on local traffic is a reasonable idea, but it doesn't know what the conditions are like in the room/area of my house with bad reception and I'm yet to encounter one that factors in that side of things.

Surely you often want to optimise for the place with the poorest signal, which might have problematic insulation that weakens your signal, and also weakens the signal before it reaches your smart router, so it doesn't know that it's a poor band choice.

Surely an app or method using your cell phone or other wifi device would make this a more useful technology.

(and I do know I can download apps and test manually - while logged into the router admin, I already do)

Thoughts?

2 comments

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tlb
RF propagation is complex and subtle, and many reasonable-sounding ideas for optimizing it end up not working in real life. At 5 GHz a fade due to multipath interference (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fading) can be less than 1 mm in size, so waving a device around doesn't capture everything important about an area.

There may be a good idea there, but you'd have to build it and test under a variety of conditions to see if it really helps.

navjack27
Nah, just picking a single channel and leaving settings on static can do wonders.

Remember, everyone else's router is on automatic, switching channels and crap all the time. If you ain't dancing around like everyone else, you're helping the issue at Large.