Router Signal strength....weak!!

[scottish]

Ive had FIOS for about a week now. I live in a 2 bedroom apartment so we arent talking about a huge place. The router is in the living room and everything in that room is fine. My desktop is in the second bedroom and it cant be more than 20-30 feet away from the router. Its only picking up a 1 or 2 bar signal at best. I was able to improve this by sitting the router on the floor and pointing the antenna round the corner in the direction of the 2nd room. This gave me a 3 bar signal most of the time, sometimes 2. In the last day or so however, even this set up has fallen to 1 or 2 bars.

Ive spoken to tech services and they told me all the systems testing they could run from their end checked out fine. Is this normal? Does the router really have that short of a broadcasting range? If not, any ideas? 

[CharlesH]

No it has a fairly large range. Have you tried to change the channel on the router yet? Odds are, you are experiencing interference from competing wireless signals in the area.  You will need to log into the router and change the channel. Refer to the last post in this thread in how to do that:

http://forums.verizon.com/vrzn/board/message?board.id=FiOS_Internet&message.id=3628&query.id=121174#...

[scottish]

When i set the password and stuff up i did set it to channel 11. I guess ill try a few different channels and see if any of them are better.

[CharlesH]

Yeh, then try like 6 for example.

[scottish]

ok. so i tried channel 6 and its no better than 11. I tried 1 and its worse. All the other channels are about on a par with channel 1.

I think im just gonna use my apple router and see if this does the job since ive never had any problems before.

One thing that does worry me. When the tech installed FIOS, he told me the fiber optic splice was weak and he was going to come back on sunday to redo it. He never called and i havent heard from him since FIOS was installed a week ago. Ive called tech service and they say they cant send a tech out since all the tests look good on their end. The tech who installed my FIOS would have to enter the work order himself and that obviously isnt going to happen at this point.

Could the splice be the cause of the problems considering the TV and DVR is working just fine?

[CharlesH]

No, you are having some kind of bad interference in the area or a possible bad router.

Interference can be caused by a number of things such as 2.4 cordless phones, a bad power outlet, and many other things. They could be next door aswell and affecting you.

Have you tried connecting a wire to the router? If you have issues wired too, this would change the situation...but if you connect another router and you good a faster connection, might aswell be a bad router.

[scottish]

Awesome. Thanks for all the helpful information so far.

One more question:

On the verizon wiki site for using your own router, its says you have to call verizon and have them remotely activate yoru CAT port on the ONT box. I tried doing this and the guy told me its always active and they have no way to remotely activate it. Mine is def not active since the ethernet light is not on or flashing and even using the verizon router (i wanted to get it working with this one first) i am getting no traffic via eithernet.

So, did i just get a bad tech guy, is there a specific number i need to call or what?

 Thanks again

[CharlesH · Accepted solution]

Well this depends if your verizon router is currently using coax or ethernet currently. you should be able to just "bridge" our router by connecting it to yours via cat5 cable. just go out from one of the lan ports on ours to your router's WAN/INTERNET port.

[CharlesH]

I also left you a private message, if you click on the envelope on the upper right hand corner.

[MoopMeep]

If you go to this website

http://www.dslreports.com/forum/vzdirect

you can have a verizon tech activate the ethernet report.