Cisco 851W ISR - how to lower the wireless power - for health...

[nnsolomare]

Hi all, that's is me as usual, and also today I would like to ask you something about Cisco 851w router.

I know that different people and different experts have different opinions, but I am careful and I don't want to risk.

The 851 router is in a place at home where I spend the most part of the time and I would like to lower the power of the wireless, so that I will be surrounded by less "radiation"...

please help me and tell me what I can do... is it something that can be done via CLI with Telnet or SSH or it must be done via SDM and or with the special Wireless software for this router?

Here is the current Wifi Configuration:

dot11 syslog
!
dot11 ssid myssid
   authentication open 
   authentication key-management wpa
   guest-mode
   wpa-psk ascii 0 Bm$3I5Mc6g9OtYvLMv3dWfdMg$VzguOsWGvoK7FPnOoVwYr8JukqOk2\cWtfG8!


 ssid myssid
 !
 speed basic-1.0 basic-2.0 basic-5.5 basic-6.0 basic-9.0 basic-11.0 basic-12.0 basic-18.0 basic-24.0 basic-36.0 basic-48.0 basic-54.0
 station-role root
 bridge-group 1
 bridge-group 1 subscriber-loop-control
 bridge-group 1 spanning-disabled
 bridge-group 1 block-unknown-source
 no bridge-group 1 source-learning
 no bridge-group 1 unicast-flooding

Thank you

[utnalove]

So you need it low...

In Cisco 851W router you have to add three commands:

 power local cck 3
 power local ofdm 3
 power client 3

3 is the lowest value for this router.

On this kind of router you have the following range of values (in mW):

  <3 - 17>  One of: 3 4 5 6 7 10 13 15 17
  maximum   Set local power to allowed maximum

3 is really low... if you go behind a normal door you can see that the wireless signal power drastically decreases, so it may be too low, but it depends on the environment.


In Access Points you can have different values, for example:

These options are available for 802.11b, 2.4-GHz clients (in mW):

{ 1 | 5 | 20 | 30 | 50 | 100 | maximum}

These options are available for 802.11g, 2.4-GHz clients (in mW):

{ 1 | 5 | 10 | 20 | 30 | 50 | 100 | maximum}

These options are available for 5-GHz clients (in mW):

{ 5 | 10 | 20 | 40 | maximum }

If your access point contains an AIR-RM21A 5-GHz radio module, these power options are available for 5-GHz clients (in dBm):

{ -1 | 2 | 5 | 8 | 11 | 14 | 16 | 17 | 20 | maximum }

But I think that's not needed for you.

[pikus]

You can also put the antenna far away from the router.

Cisco in its documentation says:

Q. How do you extend access point coverage? 
A. To extend the coverage of integrated access points in the Cisco 870 Series, customers can choose from different externally mounted antennas to allow the router to be located in one area (such as behind a counter) while coverage can be focused and extended to other areas (such as wall or ceiling placement). The Cisco 850 Series only has a single, fixed antenna connected directly to the router; there are no antenna options.

But as you can see from this picture of a 851 router, it's not true!

You can buy wifi antenna cable and the jacks...