Troubles with Wifi and the Speedstream 6520 and Bell Sympatico...

Hello

I'm on Bell Sympatico and we had a problem with our old modem/router for the longest time regarding dropouts...

so Bell sent us a brand new modem/router and we hooked it up.

If only my problems had ended there...

with this new modem (the Speedstream 6520) I have the most bizzare problems with my wifi.

If I'm sitting right next to the modem the WiFi tends to work fairly well (although MacStumbler says my signal strength is only about 73...)

Through-out most of the third floor it works fine - however as soon as I enter my room I can browse for about a minute and then suddenly my connection dies. The signal goes strength is all over the place (38, 40,) and the little airport fan in the menubar changes from 4 bars to 2 bars to 1 bar back to 4 bars...

Normally I would just assume this was an issue with the ammount of thick walls between my room and the router (its an old house) but theres one more truely bizzarre wrinkle.

Around 9:00 for the past two nights I've had no troubles whatsoever with my internet on my Powerbook. I was online for a good 2 hours before anything dropped, and even when it did it was back online and working within a few minutes.

Most of the other computers connected to the network WERE off - however they also were off the next morning when I had no connection again.

So I dont know if its that my powerbook needs an extension to its wireless (not even sure if thats an option) if its that the router isn't supporting my mac or if its just my old house.

But what really puzzles me is why it works perfectly fine for hours and then will not work at all for hours.

BTW - through ethernet everything is fine - but I dont really want to spend money on the ammount of ethernet cable I'll need in order to be hooked up.

Please - if anyone has any ideas please let me know!

Thanks in advance.

PowerBook G4 12-inch Mac OS X (10.4.4) 1.5 GHz Power PC G4, 1.25 GB DDR SDRAM, 100GB HD

Your problem sounds like mine, what i would call extremely quirky and specific. Unfortunately, I think that these types of issues will rarely be answered accurately, consistently or in a timely fashion just because of their nature. it seems to me that the only real way to solve this issue is to simply avoid using wireless whenever possible. its just one of those weird situations where the location, interference, or the distance from your router seems to be causing the problem. this was probably not very helpful but hopefully it works out!

well it was more or less what I assumed the problem to be...if only sympatico wasn't such a pain in the butt when it comes to...well...everything!

Let me just say, I now have a Macbook Pro and the issue still persists...