Re: SBC routinely installing 2Wire 400 mW AP/FW

A follow-up to my January posting about SBC's use of the
2Wire HomePortal HW1000, a 400 mW firewall / access point / DSL modem.

A new tenant moved into a building two doors down from 
my office.  He was having other computer troubles, so I helped
him out.  He has SBC DSL.  I asked him if he took them up
on their "get a free wireless AP" sign-up offer; he said "no".

In fact, because they'd sent the wrong equipment the first
time, he'd talked to customer support at least once to get
a new modem, and they'd asked him if he wanted wireless and
again he said "no".  He's a mortgage company so he wanted to
avoid wireless for security reasons.

I've got an old Linksys WAP-11 with a 15 dB omni on the roof 
feeding a few nearby clients.  Since he moved in, I've been
having trouble with those clients: dropped packets, increased 
latency, etc.

A walk around the block with MiniStumbler found a strong WEP'd
"2WIRE734" source on channel 6 outside his office.  It could 
be the apartments above.  I'm getting the same signal strength
from my AP as from this one, even two buildings away.

I decided to switch all my equipment to channel 11 to minimize 
interference.  No go.  It's a little better but not by much.  
Where it was dropping one packet in ten before, now it's 1 of 30.

Later in the day his office was open.  Sure enough, inside,
MiniStumbler says SNR 83, -28.  I jump into the web interface 
of the modem and dig around until I find the wireless 
interface's "disable" button.  

It's a good thing there's a disable button.  He explicitly
didn't want wireless and it made for a crappy day of debugging
for me.

- John 

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