Really weak signal strength on my wireless router

Hmmm...

Doom, how far away is the ps3 from the access point and are there wall/floors between them?

Your router is tagged in this thread as working, but "with a router reset." It looks like some of the early posts in the thread discuss this router. Hopefully you can suss out some answers there.

First with the basics,

@ 10 percent you will have issues. Is the router in a central location of your house. If not try moving it so that it is more equally spaced to all the devices you want to connect. In addition like others mentioned if the signal has to pass thru many walls and or floor (i.e if you have 2 stories) the signal will suffer. Also try to place the router as level as you can with your devices. Most routers come with omni-directional antennas which radiate more horizontally than vertically.

You can try to get it closer to the PS3 just to get the signal strength out of the equation. If it's close and you still have a problem then definitley you have a setup problem.

BTW, I believe I have this router (unsure if I have the 624 or 524) model and it has been working fine with my PS3 via wireless.

I say power cycle it. But at 10% is tough for any software to overcome. The pipes and the tiles in the bathroom may also be blocking it.

Yea upgrade. You don't have to go N, but definitely get something business class and uses MINO technology. (Multiple In, Multiple Out: multiple radios and antenna to bounce the signal around the bath room.)

What wireless channel are you using on the router? Try changing to channels 3 or 11 on your router.

When you do a connection test on the PS3 what NAT type do you have?

2 is good, 3 is bad. If you have 3, you need to follow the steps here to make it NAT 2.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hidZdIfoYPI

http://www.g4tv.com/thefeed/blog/pos....html#readmore

Like others have said these conditions are not helping you. The signal may be having trouble getting to your PS3 because of walls, tiles, etc. Can you try to get all those out of the picture for a moment. Either move the pS3 to your bedroom or move the router to your living room and see what you get. That way you will see what you shuold get ideally. If you still get low signal strength maybe your antenna is messed up. Just some ideas.



Doing a hard reset by pressing the button in the back like you mention will bring your router to factory settings. So you iwll have to configure it again. There are some routers that offer you to save your settings in a file which then you can load after you reset to factory settings.

Power cycle just means cutting the power out and let it get started again. You shuold try a power cycle first and if it does not help a factory reset. My 2cents.


There are other options you can try. I would consider them all or whichever is more economical. I don't think the PS3 supports N yet so even if you get one the Ps3 will not take advantage of it. I am not sure if the N routers radiate more power or have better antennas but since they are newer I would guess they do.

You can also try a signal repeater, or upgrading the antenna of your router. before you do all that I would recommend trying moving either the PS3 or the router to make sure that your walls and room configuration is your problem.

PS3 does not support N, but isn't there a more powerful/longer range G protocol that it supports? Random Best Buy Employee was trying to sell me a router with one of those when I got my Belkin (best router in the world, and only $30).

Hold the power button upon start up until you hear two beeps for the system to auto-check the a/v settings. This will work for when you switch between connections.

I've always had poor speeds over wifi with my PS3. Nothing beats direct connection if you can get it.
Across 2 floors between my router and PS3 over wifi, my speeds were ~1.5Mbps.
When my router and PS3 were 1 foot apart over wifi, my speeds were ~2.5Mbps.
With a direct connection, my speeds are ~7Mbps!

this is why I'm scared to go to wifi...I have everything hard wired now but i'm gonna get a wireless router for my psp..I think I'll leave the ps3 and 360 hard wired though

The G protocol is the best you can get on the PS3. If you want to take advantage of better G protocol like 108Mbps you need both the Transmitter and Receiver to be rated as that. The 108Mbps is outside of the standard and it has been implemented by the router makers on their own. The PS3 manual states that the PS3 wireless is 802.11 b/g so its receiver shuold support max of 54Mbps.

Ah, okay; thanks for the clarification!

You're welcome.

I forgot to mention that if you are in the process of upgrading your router, have the PS3 hardwired, and you have a PC with a 1Gigabit card, you shuold look for a router that has 1Gbit support. The PS3 supports 1 Gigabit on the wired connections. The advantage you would get here would only apply to data transfers between PC and PS3 (i.e streaming audio, video, etc)