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Sprint Hero WiFi interfering w/WiFi Router

Wife and I each have new Sprint HTC Hero. We also have a home wifi network using an older (pre-802.11n) Apple Airport Extreme base station as WDS main and an old Apple Airport Express as a WDS remote. When we're home we tend to turn on our phone's wifi.

As long as only one phone has wifi turned on, everything is fine. But within minutes of turning on wifi on the second phone as well, our wifi router starts to lose it. Apparent massive interference. After a few more minutes the router becomes catatonic, so much so that Airport Utility cannot even see the router at all.

A power cycle of the router fixes things for at most a few minutes, then it rapidly goes downhill again. Turning off the wifi on one phone (doesn't seem to matter which one) and power-cycling the router brings back perfect sanity until the next time wifi on both phones is turned on.

I have neither the time nor the energy to go through the inevitable denials and mutual finger-pointing with Apple and Sprint, but I thought I would make note of it here for the benefit of the community.
 
I don't know anything about apple routers, but I work with a wide variety of other routers on a daily basis. I would recommend changing your channel on the router. You should have channels 1-11 to choose from. experiment with higher and lower settings. If you are not using the Wireless N features, disable it and use the Wireless G and B options. From time to time I run into a situation like this and 9 times out of 10 this fixes it. As a last resort purchase a new router. Something heavily standardized like a Netgear or Linksys. I almost never have problems with these routers. Belkin routers in my opinion seem to have a lot of problems in this area. Hope this helps out.

Jack
 
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I don't know anything about apple routers, but I work with a wide variety of other routers on a daily basis. I would recommend changing your channel on the router. You should have channels 1-11 to choose from. experiment with higher and lower settings. If you are not using the Wireless N features, disable it and use the Wireless G and B options. From time to time I run into a situation like this and 9 times out of 10 this fixes it. As a last resort purchase a new router. Something heavily standardized like a Netgear or Linksys. I almost never have problems with these routers. Belkin routers in my opinion seem to have a lot of problems in this area. Hope this helps out.

Jack

Is it possible that the Hero itself could be interfering with a router? Even when WiFi is off on the Hero? I've been having occasional internet issues at home for the past couple months, and I'm curious if the Hero could be the culprit. I've tried changing the channels (Linksys WRT54g V8.2), but it doesn't seem to help.

So is it even possible for the hero to interfere with wireless internet if the phone is only communicating with the cell towers?

EDIT: That's with WiFi AND Mobile network turned off. The phone should only be communicating with the towers looking for phone calls
 
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While on the topic i had a weird issue the other day... i was using my home wifi to browse the internet, but after about 5 minutes no matter if the screen shut off or anything my wifi signal icon would disappear from the notification bar however my wifi settings still show it to be on and running :( tried reconnecting numerous times with the same end result. anyone else ran into this problem? I have not had time to research this yet but was just curious if this sounds familiar to anyone out there.
 
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While on the topic i had a weird issue the other day... i was using my home wifi to browse the internet, but after about 5 minutes no matter if the screen shut off or anything my wifi signal icon would disappear from the notification bar however my wifi settings still show it to be on and running :( tried reconnecting numerous times with the same end result. anyone else ran into this problem? I have not had time to research this yet but was just curious if this sounds familiar to anyone out there.

I have not had that exact problem, but I am only about 12 feet line-of-sight from my phone to my router and with the phone lying flat on the table most of the time my wifi icon on the phone is only showing 1 bar. If I hold the phone upright it'll sometimes briefly get 2 bars. So maybe the wifi reception on the phone just really sucks, and that is contributing to your problem?
 
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I get a good 125 feet with my phone on a Netgear 54G router. I can wonder over to my neighbors house across the street and maintain a good connection. I am glad that helped out with your issue tatonka_Hero. Interesting handle you have there "tatonka_Hero" I think I will just refer to you as "Dances With Phone" :):):)

Jack
 
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I get a good 125 feet with my phone on a Netgear 54G router. I can wonder over to my neighbors house across the street and maintain a good connection. I am glad that helped out with your issue tatonka_Hero. Interesting handle you have there "tatonka_Hero" I think I will just refer to you as "Dances With Phone" :):):)

Jack

I think it might actually be a problem with my router. Setting a static ip seems to help a bit, but I think somethings still interfering with it
 
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There is a free app called wifi analyzer in the market that shows a graph of the wifi channels near the phone. This is a great app for seeing devices that may be on the same channel and causing flooding of that channel. I use this app alot in home theater installs where many of the new remotes and whole house sound wireless in-wall keypads use these channels and can cause range issues for any units using the same or nearby channel.
 
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I have not had that exact problem, but I am only about 12 feet line-of-sight from my phone to my router and with the phone lying flat on the table most of the time my wifi icon on the phone is only showing 1 bar. If I hold the phone upright it'll sometimes briefly get 2 bars. So maybe the wifi reception on the phone just really sucks, and that is contributing to your problem?

Solved the problem. The Airport Express was behind the open TV cabinet, but I had a row of commercial DVDs in their normal commercial plastic cases between me and the router. By removing that row of DVDs from the shelf, my speed tests on the phone went from 240K to 2M.
 
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