Verizon fios weak signal?

Question

ok i have a verizon fios router

my xbox 360 is in the other room, about 3 rooms apart, not too far

i can access xbox live after a few connection tests and i can play my halo 3

but like, i rmeber seeing the signal very weak and is in red

and during halo, i cant hear my friends and lags like crazy

he says my connection is in red and is very weak

how can i fix this

is there anything that can strengthen it, is there a reason it does this, and does a splitter help?

plz tell me wat can help

Answer 1

That doesnt mean that the strength is weak, it means that you have a slow connection. The router should work fine from that far away, mine does easily. The problem is that the routers come preprogrammed not to allow port forwarding and such, the act as a firewall and dont allow through gaming and bittorrent and the such.

If you go into the router settings through your computer, you can set it to allow port forwarding. They complicate it so much I cant remember all of the things they set to block traffic, but if you just open everything up youll get the full potential out of it.

Answer 2

I'm guessing Verizon put your router on the floor like they wanted to do with ours...where it's out of the way and not seen...and they probably didn't optomize the channel either so you're competing with the other 20 wireless networks around you all on the default channel.

Put your wireless router as high up as you can and as far from electrical and metal things as you can, that'll give you the best coverage.  Try to put it in the middle of where you expect to be (usually the middle of the house).  If you have 2.4GHz cordless phones you may want to replace them with 5.8GHz, 900MHz, or the new DECT6.0 phones that won't cause interference.  Also, wireless video senders, or wireless cameras that run on 2.4GHz should be set to the farthest channel from your router (e.g. set video sender to 1 or A and put the router on channel 11).  Channels 1, 6, and 11 are preferable because they don't "overlap" with each other.

You shouldn't need this for a mear 3 rooms but If you really need more range after positioning your router as best you can, some companies sell "WiFi Repeaters" that re-transmit the information stronger to boost the signal.  If you can run wires, get an "Access Point" or a router that can be configured as an access point (a second router would cause problems) and set it to the same SSID (name) and Encryption key (security) - then computers will pick whichever is strongest.

I suppose you could always try making one of these, it will decrease the range on one side but increase range wherever it's pointed.  I was able to get from 60 up to 85 percent in my basement.  For free...well ok, a sheet of cooking foil, some glue, and cardstock or photopaper...it's worth a try!

http://www.freeantennas.com/projects/tem...

Even if it doesn't help, it sure looks cool :)

If you can't get it working the way you want, call Verizon and they should be able to help you - if you had your xbox when FiOS was installed (and they knew about it), they should have checked to make sure it could connect strong enough.

Lastley, change the default WEP key - it defaults the the last 10 digits of the MAC address - so if you don't change this, anyone who knows this fact could connect to your network, even though it's secure.  The MAC is broadcast with the SSID and picked up by every computer in range.