I have a home network with two Wi-Fi access points:
- One Netgear WN604.
- One ZyXEL VMG1312-B10A (the latter also connects the whole network to the Internet via VDSL).
Both are on the same SSID as per this answer, and are backhaul connected by Powerline adapters.
From time to time I have flakiness in my Wi-Fi network - disconnects, slowness, etc., and have been trying to diagnose and fix this. I’m relatively sure the Powerline adapters aren’t the issue, because when I connect machines directly to the Ethernet connection, everything is robust and fine and internet access is nice and fast.
One theory I have is that this may be because both Wi-Fi access points are set to “Auto” for the channel, which in theory means they search for a good channel periodically, settling on ones which don’t clash with much else.
However, I’m in a busy apartment block with lots of Wi-Fi networks, so I’m guessing from time to time they may clash by picking either channels close to each other or the same channel. Is this theoretically possible, and might it explain Wi-Fi disconnects?
I’ve now tried manually setting them both to separate channels—1 and 11— so will see if these issues go away. Because they are sporadic problems, though, it would be nice to know if my theory makes sense.