The Last Straw

On Saturday night I had need of an additional wifi access point at my house.  So, I scrounged up an old Belkin access point and plugged it in.  Since I already have an access point running on channel 3, I just left the new one on channel 6.  Some time later my son noticed that the Wii controllers would not sync.  He had been playing the Wii for several hours so my response to his desperate plea of "Fix it", was "Go outside."

I thought nothing of the problem until Sunday when the Wii controllers still would not sync.  I started to wonder if that additional access point caused enough interference to make the Bluetooth Wii controllers in-operable.  Bluetooth is designed to handle interference by hopping to the next 1 MHz wide channel.  However, I don't know how well that works when syncing.  To get a feel for the situation I ran a nifty little program called wifi radar.  According to it I live in what could aptly be described as a "wifi rich" zone.  Every 802.11 channel had at least one, and usually several active access points.

My need of the extra access point expired on Sunday night and as soon as I unplugged the access point I tried to sync the Wii remotes.  This time it was immediate Wii sync success, and they have been fine ever since.  I guess that extra access point was the Wifi that broke the Bluetooth's back.