Our cable company recently added broadband phone to their lineup, so I switched over from DSL. When the cable guy was done, I hooked up my wireless security appliance and tested the connection with my laptop. I was impressed with the speed difference. Then I hooked up the phone and tried it. It worked great. I thought everything was going to be OK. I was wrong.

After dinner, my wife got on the phone to call my daughter while I was online. My wireless connection speed immediately dropped to less than 2Mbps (it should be solid at 11 Mbps). As soon as she hung up, the connection speed recovered. It didn’t make sense. Voice over IP is not that bandwidth-intensive.

That wasn’t the only problem. The voice quality on the other end of our line was terrible. The audio was choppy. The person on the other end could barely understand us most of the time. I was ready to tell the cable company to forget it all and reverse the changes. But I finally figured it out.

I had my wireless phone next to my wireless router. Traffic from the radio in the phone was crossing up with traffic from the wireless causing interference in both. I moved the phone across the room and everything got right again. Problem solved.

Cheers!
The Geek

Have a computer problem? A question about your latest gadget? Click here to Ask the Geek! Kenny “The Geek” Harthun has been playing with geeky stuff since 1965. He’s a Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer with Connective Computing, Inc. providing network, desktop and info security support services to a wide range of clients.