Experienced this first hand. Had a crappy WiFi connection at home, started to investigate and found out that signal qulity degraded a lot when my Seagate SDD was connected on USB3.
My desktop has really flaky WiFi. Its WiFi adapter and a few peripherals are connected using USB3 ports. I just thought I was too far from the router (it's a room away through two walls). Is it possible switching them to the 2.0 ports could make my signal better?
Maybe. Although switching wifi router into something like 802.11b-only or a-only mode and selecting a fixed least busy channel might be a better long term solution, as USB3 isn't the only source of EMI.
I challenge that 802.11b is more reliable than 802.11n, which offers MIMO. But even if that was true, the speeds of 802.11b are abysmal for todays standards.
I'm not aware of USB interfering with anything 2.4Ghz. If you're on 5Ghz I've not seen USB2/3 coex be a problem. Unless your dongle vendor did a bad job, USB dongles should be designed to minimize the impact of this interference because all they do is WiFi + USB (i.e. shouldn't matter if you are on 5 or 2.4). That being said, it's a simple thing to try so why not?
Does "flaky" here mean connection going in & out vs inconsistent & bad speed?
Assuming we're talking about speed rather than the connection itself, two walls can be a challenge if you're on 5ghz depending on the quality of your router & dongle. Do you have any old devices on your network? Your WiFi router will run at the speed of the slowest client. Can't recall if camping is a problem - I'm less clear about the details here, but it should be. If your 802.11AC dongle is on the same frequency as 802.11N, performance will be degraded off the bat so consider moving those devices onto a different frequency if you have a dual-band router (e.g. wireless printers or older wireless TVs can be causes).
If the connection itself is flaky, check if the RSSI is really bad. Anything >= -70 dBm is good & anything <= -80 dBm is pretty bad. Note the negative sign. -90 is worse than -80. If you're on 2.4Ghz you could also be having issues from poorly shielded electronics (e.g. old microwaves) or cordless phones.
Please give a generous reading for what I wrote. Off-hand, I was referring to any WiFi dongles he would have likely bought. Not an 8 year old report of problems encountered at the time that's not even exploring self desense as a problem.
Yes, USB 2 or 3 can cause issues for 2.4 Ghz if you don't shield your components properly. Are you saying that WiFi dongles, whose only job is to connect to these networks, isn't shielded properly?
