WIFI Signal and Speed Changing ALOT

Hello all.

Been Googling for the past day or so to try and get this problem sorted.

Heres goes:

I just moved house (live in France) to where a friend is living, we all live on one floor and the WIFI modem (A "DartyBox") is in the living room. I have an iMac 20" and am about 15m from the box (with a couple of walls, nothing dramatic). Now when I am on my computer I notice that about 80% of the time I have 1 or 2 bars of signal out of 6 and my speed is absolutely SH*T! Then every now and then I get sudden change and it goes to 6 out of 6 bars and my speed is great.

Now I am a gamer and with the summer vacation coming up I have to be able to play lag free... Whenever I see that 6 out of 6 bars I quickly open up my game and start playing for as long as I can with a low latency.

Now please tell me what I can do -- I just changed the channel of the modem (It was set to "Auto, 3" to channel 11) but no change.

I very much hope you guys can help me out here,

Thanks very much.

Will.

Wifi frequencies are very sensitive to Above all else, water. Normally a problem only outside with foliage , humans are also mostly water... could it be possible that your friend is sitting between his wifi device and yours? If you both game, then odds are that you are both sitting in the way of the signal? When you are both sitting , the signal degrades / is blocked and when he gets up, the signal goes back to 6 bars?

Just something to think about while I try to find other causes.

iMac? Internal network card, USB adapter, ect?
OEM internal cards and USB adapters are often...well.. less than optimal..

It could possibly be that one of us are in the way of the signal, but the thing I dont understand is how I have such a damn high latency..could this be that someone else is on the network downloading 24/7?

many providers will connect several houses/users on a a 'sub-lan' or 'loop'. In US , the is is very common with the cable television providers. May be between 10-100 useres per loop. if they are all accessing at same time, then latencey goes out the roof. Especially if they are gaming, watching or downloading video, ect.

add on top of that they high packet loss from weak signals. every little piece of informations that is not recieved properly has to be retransmitted until it IS received properly

So I am guessing my best bet is just to play very much later at night when less users are on the network or 'loop' that way I should have a better connection and speed..?

the possibility that the channel youand your freind is running on is 'overcrowded' by other users in the area?

survey freeware ( like inSSIDer ) will tell you who is boradcasting on what channels nearby and then you can both find a least used channel.

Couldn't hurt.