Strange Question Ask Slashdot: Why Does Wireless Gear Degrade Over Time ?

[Sionyn]

strange question on slashdot  obviously it the magic smoke at fault here (i can't beilve this made it to main page)
http://ask.slashdot.org/story/12/10/21/1335208/ask-slashdot-why-does-wireless-gear-degrade-over-time

[G7PSK]

Judging from the answers to the question no one has heard of the joys capacitors and their little quirks.

[ErikTheNorwegian]

Some HP in the Dv series (9,600) has that symtom, due to a very bad chipset from nvida..

[NiHaoMike]

Most common problem I see is bad capacitors. Linksys/Cisco is particularly bad at this. My BEFSX41 failed with bad caps about 2 years after I bought it in 2004. (So much for a quality product...) I replaced the caps with OSCONs and have been using it with no problems ever since. Two of my friends have had problems with their WRT54Gs failing.

I had the power amplifier in a cheap Belkin go flaky, but that most likely was because I was using it to connect to a community wireless ISP and I overclocked it quite hard in DD-WRT to get a stable connection. I did install heatsinks, but apparently not enough.

[amyk]

My first thought was bad caps too. The capacitor plague is not over yet.

Judging from the answers to the question no one has heard of the joys capacitors and their little quirks.

It's Slashdot, there are a lot more programmers/software people than EEs there.

[Sionyn]

i can understand from a reliability standpoint but a signal degradation over time ?

[ejeffrey]

To be honest, this sounds like an illusory problem.  The most likely reason for reception to degrade with time is the increase of congestion on the 2.4 GHz band.  As your neighbors add wireless networks, you add more client devices, and everybody gets more non-802.11 devices operating on the 2.4 GHz band, everybody's reception gets worse.  If a few people pump up their Tx power to try to compensate, it makes it worse for everybody (and doesn't really help them either).  To top it off, bandwidth expectations continue to increase, so what was a good signal 2 years ago might be 'barely working' today. 

If you get a new router with a newer standard, a upgrade to 5.6 GHz, or get a router with more antennas for MIMO, you recover some of what you lost.  Unless you do side-by-side comparisons of new vs. old routers of the same model with the same configuration it is going to be really hard to separate router failure from external causes.

Gradual signal degradation is certainly possible for instance if the PSU filter caps start to fail and pass more RF noise into the analog supply, but 2 years is a bit fast for that and it seems unlikely that would be a systemic problem across multiple manufacturers and product lines.

[G7PSK]

Its not just caps in the switching power supplies that degrade so do caps running at RF generally the higher the frequency the more problem you will have from drift in the caps coils and other components. it is not just the router the card on the computer will also loose power, that's why amateur radio operators keep checking the output of their transmitters not just for frequency drift but for power output as well. 

[Gall]

I replaced these capacitors in my wireless access point twice.

The symptom was always the same: working with no load and resets under heavy traffic. A scope had shown significant spikes on power lines inside. Cause: Al foil capacitor ESR increade. Repair: replaced capacitor.