mickevh
Distinguished Member
The short answer is, there's not much you can do. The Wi-Fi airwaves don't "belong" to anyone and anyone can use them any way they want to as long as they don't exceed the mandated maximum transmit power. (Legend has it that in the US, an apartment building owner tried to mediate the channel plan for his residents, but got sued by some ambulance chasing lawyer who asserted that the landlord could not do so because the airwaves didn't "belong" to him.)
All you can do is try to find a channel that has the biggest signal margin (difference between your Wi-Fi and any others using the same channel.) There are more channels available in the 5GHz waveband (and the transmit power falls off faster,) so there's a better chance of finding a less polluted or even clear channel for you 5GHz kit (and better chance of finding the "fat" channels N & AC need for their faster speeds.) However, not all kit is 5GHz capable.
SSID's are not "channels" as such, they are just a named "set" of devices (and happen to be using a particular radio channel.) It's not at all unusual for Wi-Fi AP's to offer multiple SSID's - almost all enterprise kit does it and as you've observed increasingly SOHO gear is doing it to avail "main" and "guest" networks and ISP's are trying to build their own large scale "public hotspot" services by using all their subscribers to offer an "public hotspot" SSID. But each SSID isn't tuned to a separate radio channel, they can all use the same one and hence you can observe their RSSI as the same or similar.
Then, in big installations, we would deploy multiple AP's (sometimes hundreds on big sites) and advertise the same SSID's out of all of them - we don't use different SSID's for each AP. So again it's not unusual to see the same SSID out of different AP's on different channels. If you were to visit some of the big deployments I've done, you'd find most of the campus had locations where you could find my SSID's on all channels because you'd be very likely to be "in range" of multiple AP's all tuned differently (say 1,6,11.) Sounds like you are seeing something like that with your "joes" SSID's - probably 2 AP's tuned to different channels advertising the same SSID(s.)
I'm not surprised the FCC and ISP haven't intervened, as nothing your have described is "wrong" - Wi-Fi is "just like that" I am afraid.
All you can do is try to find a channel that has the biggest signal margin (difference between your Wi-Fi and any others using the same channel.) There are more channels available in the 5GHz waveband (and the transmit power falls off faster,) so there's a better chance of finding a less polluted or even clear channel for you 5GHz kit (and better chance of finding the "fat" channels N & AC need for their faster speeds.) However, not all kit is 5GHz capable.
SSID's are not "channels" as such, they are just a named "set" of devices (and happen to be using a particular radio channel.) It's not at all unusual for Wi-Fi AP's to offer multiple SSID's - almost all enterprise kit does it and as you've observed increasingly SOHO gear is doing it to avail "main" and "guest" networks and ISP's are trying to build their own large scale "public hotspot" services by using all their subscribers to offer an "public hotspot" SSID. But each SSID isn't tuned to a separate radio channel, they can all use the same one and hence you can observe their RSSI as the same or similar.
Then, in big installations, we would deploy multiple AP's (sometimes hundreds on big sites) and advertise the same SSID's out of all of them - we don't use different SSID's for each AP. So again it's not unusual to see the same SSID out of different AP's on different channels. If you were to visit some of the big deployments I've done, you'd find most of the campus had locations where you could find my SSID's on all channels because you'd be very likely to be "in range" of multiple AP's all tuned differently (say 1,6,11.) Sounds like you are seeing something like that with your "joes" SSID's - probably 2 AP's tuned to different channels advertising the same SSID(s.)
I'm not surprised the FCC and ISP haven't intervened, as nothing your have described is "wrong" - Wi-Fi is "just like that" I am afraid.
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