WiFi Dropping

We recently relocated and while looking for a house we are staying with my parents. When we were settled we had Time Warner come out and add a whole home DVR system to the house set up. After this we all began using the wifi connection at their home.

We have the desktop computer hardwired to the router. 3 iPads, 3 iPods, 2 MacBook Pros, and an XBOX 360 connect on and off randomly throughout the day and night. The first sign of a problem was when the Xbox kept dropping connection. We thought too many of us were connected at once, however this would happen in the middle of the night as well when nothing else was connected.

We called the technical support and they had us reset everything twice. The problem continued. Our daughters also began having dropping issues occasionally when connected to their iPad or iPod. We thought there may be a problem with the router so we disconnected it and hooked up my TimeCapsule to use as a router. This seemed to solve the problem for a short time period.

In the last couple of days the Xbox began being dropped again as well as all of us tonight. We reset everything and were able to connect. Before I moved we had all of these devices minus the desktop computer connected without ever having an issue. We also had a Wii connected and various visitors would connect to our guest network. There was not a single case of anyone being dropped. This tells me the problem has to be here but I am confused as to what is causing it.

I asked out ISP if we needed a faster connection and we were told that was not the issue. I ran a ping test and there was no packet loss, the ping was 483ms and Jitter was 232ms we re-ran it and we had 0 packet loss, ping at 73ms and jitter at 14ms about 2 minutes later, third test gave 0 packet loss, ping 437ms and jitter 33ms, and final test 0 packet loss, ping 413ms and jitter 35ms. We then tried a different server and the results were basically the same. Can anyone tell me where I should be looking to solve this problem?

Welcome to the Mac Forums. Your post was moved here to the correct forum where you will be more likely to receive replies.

Also, when posting please break your question into paragraphs. A wall of text is not easy to read and will receive fewer replies. Thanks.

Thanks

Thanks You

Hi,
It may be reasonable to deduce that it is something to do with your location if everything was fine before you moved.

You can check for any large obstructions or metal objects causing interference nearby to your router and also run a quick wi-fi scan to see if you have other competing networks on the same channel using the same frequency band (2.4 Ghz usually).

There is a free app called iStumbler but there is also a useful tool in Mountain Lion (I'm not sure which OS you have) which you can access by holding down the 'Alt' key whilst you click the wi--fi icon on the top right menu bar. Go to the bottom of the list and choose 'Open Wi-Fi Diagnostics', ignore the 'Welcome' pane and go up to 'View' top left in the menu bar and choose 'Wi-Fi Scan'.

This will find the networks in your vicinity and show if you are in competition with other routers on the same band and if your Signal to Noise Ratio is poor. A rule of thumb to interpret SNR is the greater the gap between the Signal and Noise figures the better the reception is.

Report back and let us know what's happening. (If memory serves me correctly your Time Capsule is Dual band so you might want to opt for putting your mac pros onto the 5GHZ band and let everything else default to 2.4GHZ)