Wifi – ping round trip time on WiFi

First I add that some of these replies need clarification.

There are two kinds of overlap, one is channel overlap where the frequencies overlap, and the second being signal overlap.

You MUST have signal overlap for all devices to have coverage in all areas, or even most devices in most areas.

Secondly, there are various schools of thought for frequency overlap and some manufacturers even suggest putting all APs on a common channel. In the case of roaming IP phones this case becomes even stronger as a phone may hop across APs while in a call. This of course depends much on the hardwae of the phones and antenna placement and design.

Let us assume that we had a large open area that we wanted wifi coverage in. Now lets take a pole and place it in the middle of the area. Now we place 4 directional 90 degree antennas on the pole, each 90 degrees from the other . In this situation one may make a strong case for having all APs on the same channel to facilitate roaming. In theory there is little signal overlap but all frequencies overlap.

Now we have an open area with walls on four sides. and place an AP on each of the four walls. The signals WILL overlap from each of the 90 degree antennas , so we may want to consider using separate non overlapping channels on each AP , however there are only 3 non overlapping channels. 1, 6 , and 11. So instead we do the best we can in North America this might be 1, 4, 7, and 11 , each AP having SOME necessary frequency overlap. Of course in a perfect world this might be better accomplished with three APS in a triangular configuration.

In my home I have toyed with APs on Same channel and separate channels and in the end I see little coverage difference., I do see however that some devices such as wireless IP phones can more easily hop to another AP while in a phone call. I see that in most areas I do not have more than 2 overlapping signals and each on channel 4 at present. As I sit here I can launch wifi seeker on my android and see either of the 2 available APs and even connect to either. This of course is easier to test with separate SSIDs but more practical to use common SSIDs fopr everyday use.

WISP? Meaning Wireless ISP? If so, there's your likely answer. Wireless is unreliable and you're seeing proof of that.

You can't really fix it because your medium (the atmosphere) is really awful for transmitting data. First because air is a hub instead of a switch so you're sharing it with anybody around you and colliding packets, second because CSMA/CA is slower than CSMA/CD, third because wireless is generally half-duplex instead of full duplex, and fourth because there are orders of magnitude higher interference through the air versus copper. [Microwaves, for example, operate at the same wavelength as 802.11b/g... but the microwave operates at about 500-1000 Watts vs your wireless antenna's 100 milliwatts. Microwaves are shielded, but shielding isn't perfect and microwaves aren't regulated by the FCC so it's not illegal if they cause interference.] Plus the fact that you're going through 10+ hops just to get to the Internet. That can't be helping, particularly if there's any NAT or firewalling going on.

As @dbasnett says, the traceroute ping latency to a given host only indicates the state of the entire network in between the interfaces taken as a whole at that point in time. That's why the response times go down sometimes. They're spiky because the network is unreliable. Your pathping looks good because it is running a large number of queries instead of just 3 that tracert is running. So pathping shows you what the network is doing over a period of 325 seconds (by default), and tracert is showing you what 3 packets per hop on the network are doing.