[SharpLittleGuppy]

Hi, I'm seeking help on this forum because my ISP and Linksys are no help whatsoever.

Over the past couple of months, our wireless connection has had moments of slowing incredibly, or shutting off completely. This started happening shortly after we got some new neighbors in the house next door. At first we noticed that when we got booted from our wireless there was another connection showing up in the list, just a generic 2wire110. Now, that connection is still there, but there's another called "mwaha", one called "2wire444" and one called "home". Before these neighbors moved in, there were no other connections listed. All of our other neighbors are elderly and probably do not have internet, much less wireless. Do these other connections have anything to do with ours being so crappy all of a sudden? They are generally very weak (one or two bars) and only show up when we get kicked off, or our connection slows.

BTW, all of the other connections don't show up at the same time, at most two are visible together, they generally alternate. And we do have a linksys router, I don't have the model number handy, but I can get it if necessary. We have one computer hardwired which doesn't seem to ever be effected, and three computers and an xbox that use the wireless connection (rarely ever more than two devices at once). I know it's not the number of devices we have connected causing this, because it still happens even if only one device is using bandwidth.

Any suggestions on how to handle this? We do have a WEP set up. I'd like to 1) know if someone else is causing this, 2) know who it is, 3) block them if possible.

I've googled the problem, but haven't found any directions I can follow very easily. I'm rather inexperienced with networks of any kind, so I'd need specific directions if I need to check/fix something.

I greatly appreciate any feedback and apologize for being dense if this is an obvious problem.

[cwwozniak]

Hi SharpLittleGuppy, and welcome to TSG.

It could be that your router's wireless access point is running on the same or adjacent channel as one of your neighbors. This could cause random interference and getting knocked off of your router. Some newer routers let you set them to automatically find the best channel and use it while others just let you set a new channel number. No matter how you change the channel on the router, you would not need to change any settings on your connected computers.

As for using WEP encryption; it is good enough to keep honest people from accessing your wireless network. However if someone wanted to get it, they could probably crack the encryption key in under a minute. If the router and all connecting equipment support it, you should use 128 bit WPA encryption with a long key having a mix of numbers and upper and lower case letters that would be difficult for someone to guess.

EDIT: If you need specific instructions for setting up your hardware, we are not able to do that unless you first tell us the exact Brand, Model Number, and Hardware/Firmware version number of the hardware. Some products list the version number on the product label right after the model number (like "v6").