Change your access point channel
How smart is your access point?

If you live in an area saturated in Wi-Fi signals being broadcast from a multitude of different homes and businesses, it’s really interesting to note how modern day, smart access points start to react.

You’ll suddenly see your fast Wi-Fi slow right down, with pages, video and imagery taking ages to load, when only half an hour before it was running smoothly and quickly. Welcome to the world of interference.

When focussing specifically at the crowded 2.4GHz space, you’ll notice that access points (such as your BT Broadband router) will frequently change the channel it is working on, several times an hour, fighting to find the quietest channel to operate on.

These changes don’t happen very quickly, and you’ll begin to notice a lag in the internet speed. Your access point/router is re-configuring itself. Lucky thing, but what about you and your users?
Fixing your channel manually to the quietest and less crowded channel is the best solution. Very few times do automated setups for Wi-Fi products make the most sense. In this instance, automatic is not smartest!

If every other business or home in the local area uses the same or similar product, then there’s a high chance that every access point is playing this game, jumping around all over the place fighting for the same space. It’s a game that will never end.

Maybe work together with your neighbours, bring down the power of each broadcast signal so it doesn’t bleed across properties and offices, and choose fixed channels to begin to give everyone a better experience of Wi-Fi.

Interference doesn’t need to be an issue with a little smart setup of your products and working together for a better future.

If you need assistance in your business in London, Cardiff or Hampshire, our team of Wi-Fi Experts at Geekabit will be delighted to work with you to find the solution.

Awards Season for Geekabit

The Geekabit team have been hard at work throughout the start of Autumn as the awards and event season kicks off in full swing, bringing connectivity to the those being crowned captains of their industries and clubs.

We’ve been working in a huge number of venues in London, Birmingham and around Southern England helping our clients who specialise in charity auctions, powered by iPads and other devices, to install and deliver solid networks over the course of each event.

Working in different venues on a regular basis means we have to conduct full site surveys to ensure the guaranteed connectivity of the network, and introduces us to nightly challenges installing temporary networks.

On top of our work in festival fields and outside on the roofs of many public buildings, working within city centre hotel locations brings many challenges – not least the competing installed networks as well as interference from a large number of external sources.

If you’re looking for a temporary internet connection or Wi-Fi network in London, Cardiff, South Wales or Hampshire, why not speak to our team of experts who will be delighted to create a unique solution for your needs.IMG_4388

Fixing Wi-Fi in London, Hampshire and South Wales

When we mention what our team does, although “Fixing and Installing Wi-Fi” sounds pretty geeky, you’ll soon find that a small crowd forms around us. Literally everywhere.

Wherever we go and whoever we see, everyone at some point has an issue with Wi-Fi. It’s now almost (or should be) ubiquitous in society, and yet there are so many people who have issues, without understanding at all what is going on.

Often the fixes are relatively simple and today’s big “calamity” can be easily resolved with a brief visit.

What gets our teams in Hampshire, London and Cardiff really turned on though is not the knowledge or the skill of understanding the issue, but getting down on the ground at one of our clients, setting to work measuring and reading all the different environments that are going on.

It really, really excites us. We will go above and beyond to make sure we find out what is going on, and spend a huge amount of time on roofs, up ladders, out in the rain, digging up fields and running up and down stairs, just to make sure that simple thing works seamlessly “connecting to Wi-Fi”.

And our business growing, due to our passions. We’ve opened offices in London and Cardiff after starting in Hampshire a few years ago, and we’re proud to be specialists.

We know that when people call, they have a real need. And we have a huge passion to solve that.

The Wi-Fi Art to Cabling

The one major disadvantage of working in Wi-Fi is that you end up coming into contact with a lot of cabling. An awful lot of cabling.

People are often surprised at the kilometres of cabling that we install each month, considering our love and passion for the art of good Wi-Fi. But cabling is our necessary evil.

We’ve developed partnerships with a number of elite data cabling manufacturers, with a number of accreditations being undertaken to ensure we are at the forefront of techniques and new technologies.

But, along the way, we bump into installations that are the stuff of nightmares – cabling nightmares that wake us up in the night sweating.

When initially installing a data network, everyone involved sets off with the best of intentions. It looks beautiful, all cables are routed, labelled and numbered, with little slack and all coming from the same source. Cable ties are a plenty, and it is the OCD stuff of dreams.

But, then, something goes wrong, other suppliers get involved, and everything begins to go awry. And then another thing happens, more people come and put new cables over the top, broken boxes are left in the rack powered off, and cables ends are left to sway in the breeze of the nearest air conditioning unit.

When that happens, and it inevitably does, our work diagnosing issues is made so much more difficult. It can take hours sorting through cable racks and channels figuring out where something should go. Absolute hours – and it can all be avoided.

Good cable management saves time, reduces the amount of equipment (and therefore electricity) permanently powered on, and makes finding issues so much quicker.

A little bit of tidying never hurt anyone.

Muddying the field of IT installation

We’ve spent the last week out and about, luckily enjoying the sunshine and making a difference to the connectivity of our clients.

What has completely surprised us is how many of our clients have in-house or contracted external IT support, yet these organisations aren’t prepared to create, design and install temporary or permanent Wi-Fi connectivity solutions outdoors.

Our work continues to increase in this sector – on the roofs, on top of portacabins and digging holes through fields – and its probably one of the most rewarding parts of our activity.

From our offices in London, Hampshire and Cardiff, we are able to hire out for a day, week or longer period, or sell permanently, a wide range of solutions that enable a complete IT network in a field.

Whether you need to get a point to point connection to an outlying barn, increase the network connectivity between buildings, or setup festival offices that can take advantage of every cloud app going through the power of satellite internet, we are quite prepared to get “down and dirty” in order to keep our clients happy.

Our IT installation services now include such technically challenging items such as spades, duct tape and steel toe capped boots, and we’re in the process of completing all the health and safety qualifications to ensure we can provide you with the best temporary internet and Wi-Fi solutions.

Plus we love a bit of mud.

Our Week in Wi-Fi in London, Cardiff & Hampshire

Wi-Fi might be ubiquitous but where you pop the Access Point and it’s general direction is quite important.

In the past week we’ve been to a number of interesting installations.

Firstly, we were called out to a domestic install in Hampshire (unusual for us, but in our quest to sort out rubbish Wi-Fi, we headed the cries for help). There we found a point to point link rather hopefully being used as a stand in for a proper external access point. It was even helpfully setup in Bridge Mode.

That was soon sorted by installing a nice Ubiquiti UniFi External AP, which had quite a terrific coverage and throughput around 360 degrees in the property, and certainly solved the issue of coverage in a nearby residential property.

The homeowners even stated “we’re never going out again now we have Netflix working”. Points scored in our quest against bad Wi-Fi.

We also visited another commercial manufacturing premises in London who couldn’t figure out why their pretty, shiny new access points produced no extra coverage over their older, dustier and legacy solution.

Having had a quick look, we realised their brilliant new Access Points were firmly pointed in the air, providing Wi-Fi for all the birds, bees and passing low flying aeroplanes. Admittedly, the channel usage was perfect, the antenna gain ideal, but the AP’s were the wrong way round.

There’s a key difference between having the right equipment and the ability to install it, and we will be delighted to help anyone who needs some advice.

Our teams in Cardiff, London and Hampshire will are always waiting to hear from you.

Useful tips for achieving high-performance Wi-Fi in your business
Our wonderful Wi-Fi experts have decided to share some of their secrets with you today, so that you have the best Wi-Fi coverage possible in your office or place of work. It’s not often that we can coax them out and get them to reveal their magic so consider yourself lucky…
Firstly, and this may sound obvious, but you need to assess what you need from your coverage. If you underestimate the coverage needed you may find the Wi-Fi signal from your network is weak in some areas of the building. Conversely, if you over-populate the area with APs (that’s access points, such as router, to non-Geeks) your network will be at risk of cross channel interference, where the AP’s (which will likely be on the same channel of frequency), are too close and stop each other working properly.
Speaking of frequency, you ideally want to set up your AP or router to operate on the 5GHz band as the primary band, as this will give you a astonishing 8x the network capacity than if you use 2.4GHz.
Think carefully about where you place your APs. It may seem sensible to pop them in a corridor if you want to service 2 rooms on either side of said corridor, but walls will inhibit Wi-Fi performance. You could also look at removing any objects that sit directly between the AP and the devices that need to pick up the Wi-Fi signal.
Most routers come with antennae so make sure those are fixed on and move them to point where needed.
Check your office or work space for old devices that work on 802.11b Wi-Fi – they will slow your network down considerably. You can find reports and software that will identify old hardware running on 802.11b, so make sure you get rid of them all! Also look out for items that run on 2.4GHz radio frequency (i.e. Bluetooth headsets, cordless phones and baby monitors) as these will also cause interference.
Finally, the SSID (service set identifier) is a case sensitive, 32 alphanumeric identifier that client devices use to connect with a network. Try to set up your router so that it only uses one defined SSID to reduce network overheads and inrcease performance.
If all of this is rather meaningless or confusing, you can call in one of the Geekabit team (and don’t forget we have offices in Cardiff, London and Hampshire) to carry out a survey of all of the above.
A confusing problem using an iPhone 6 for browsing

One of the Geekabit Wi-Fi team came across a frustrating but interesting issue just recently, when browsing the internet on an iPhone 6. In iOS 8.1 and using Chrome or Safari, around a fifth of attempts to load a webpage would stall at approximately 20% loaded.

No matter how much time our Geek gave it, the iPhone would never finish loading the page. Refreshing the page sometimes worked, and everything would often be fine moments later…  until the next page loading ‘stall’. The same problem appeared to be affecting Mail and some other apps – the inbox just wouldn’t update some of the time and worked seamlessly at other times.

So, all very strange. A visit to the Genius bar to speak to Apple proved fruitless (haha!) as the same problem could not be replicated in their store…
It seemed the problem was more to do with the home router settings than the iPhone itself, so our Geek started to investigate the channel width of the router. It seemed likely that the router’s 5GHz setting was defaulting to just provide the newer, wider and often troublesome 80MHz channel width, when it should have been set to 40MHz, or even possible 20MHz – after some fiddling with the settings on the router our tame Geek was oncec again able to enjoy speedy and uninterrupted browsing on his iPhone.
Let’s talk about site surveys
We’ve told you all about our amazing work setting up temporary Wi-Fi networks anywhere they are needed (and boy do we have an exciting project coming up this month!), but what else do the fabulous folk here at Geekabit do?
We often get calls from businesses of all shapes and sizes across London and the South East who have experienced problems with ‘the internet’. Yes, there are still some areas where download speeds are a little slow, but the vast majority of the time that just isn’t the issue. The poor people whose work or business is starting to suffer have normally looked at the router, checked it is working and then don’t know where to begin figuring out why the Wi-Fi is so slow, or drops out periodically. In a thriving business hub like London you certainly expect to be able to use the internet…
So many businesses rely on emails as a minimum, others use cloud based tech to access and store documents and many are using VOIP or Skype to connect with colleagues. Reliable fast Wi-Fi is a must for lots of businesses, and that’s where Geekabit come in. We have an office in London as well as our bases in Hampshire and Cardiff, so are ideally placed to help.
If you’ve been experiencing sluggish Wi-FI, our expert Wi-Fi consultants can visit your premises and carry out a site survey to assess what the problem is, and then make recommendations on how to make it better. We use some of the best diagnostic kit available and can also install far better networks than you will ever be able to get ‘off the peg’. Together we can have your office Wi-Fi in tip-top shape and your business can thrive and make use of the best new digital technologies out there. That’s why we’re the UK’s most loved Wi-Fi experts!
Geekabit brings the internet to any event you like, anywhere you like…

We’ve worked with one of the biggest festivals in the world to ensure that each year they have fast and reliable Wi-Fi for their stages, fed from a dedicated and secure network. We have that particular challenge nailed so feel that we can say with absolute confidence that the Geekabit Wi-Fi team can help you take the internet to any event you are planning.

Are you a university planning a research project or dig that might take you into the wild Welsh moors for a fortnight? Don’t rely on 4G; why not see if Geekabit could help you out. We would love the chance to get our teeth into providing Wi-Fi at some more challenging locations.

Holding a party in a marquee next to a polo pitch in the posh part of Surrey? Make sure your guests can share every moment on their favourite social networks (without using up their data allowance for the next year) and let Geekabit install a temporary network.

Managing a three-day conference showcasing some incredible new computer software or sharing HD sales videos? Don’t be like the poor organiser of an EU ‘Digital Focus’ conference in Italy where the I.T. tech went on strike, leaving the unimpressed delegates with no internet at all… Geekabit will ensure you have fast reliable Wi-Fi to showcase products and impress your delegates.

So, in summary – we work anywhere. We can bring the internet to a field in Hampshire, a rooftop in London or a conference hall in Cardiff. Fast, reliable and secure Wi-Fi internet. Just pick up the phone and tell us what you need.