Wiring up your home can be a frustrating endeavor. Unless you live in a perfectly square box without any interior walls, you probably have dead spots where signal strength drops and bandwidth isn’t satisfactory. This guide steps through some of the simplest ways to upgrade your router’s performance and improve the speed of your home network.
- Upgrade your router
The first thing to check is the age and status of your wireless modem. If you bought a classic router, like Linksys’ WRT54G when those units were new, it means your router is now 8-13 years old. There’s a reason that the WRT54G is one of the most popular routers of all time, with millions sold — Linksys built a solid consumer router with good performance and a robust feature set for common home users.
Given that the WRT54G launched in 2002, however, there’s now much, much faster equipment on the market. That modem supported 802.11g, which allowed for transmission speeds of up to 54Mbps (megabits per second). The newest wireless standard, 802.11ac, specifies a single link throughput rate of 500Mbps. Exactly how many links and antenna are on a newer router varies from device to device, but the theoretical performance even from a low-end 802.11ac router is nearly 10x what you can expect from 802.11g.
- Make sure the router is placed properly
Improper router placement is a common mistake. People tend to put routers next to the cable modem, often right beside it, and in close proximity to a desktop computer (if they own one). This makes sense from a logistical perspective, but it’s often not the best location for the hardware. It might make sense to put the router in the center of your home or apartment, but this isn’t necessarily the best tactic, either.
The router should be placed central to the areas of the house where people spend the most time, and in an area where the wireless signal has to pass through as few walls and obstacles as possible. Imagine standing at one end of a 30-foot long room. If there’s no furniture or walls, you may be able to hear people talking loudly at the far end, even though you’re 30 feet away. Drop two dividing walls and some kitchen appliances between you and the other two people, and you may not hear a thing – even though the distance between you hasn’t changed at all.
Your smartphone or tablet has to “listen” for the router through the floor, the walls, and the interference from any other appliances that might be nearby. Position the router in such a way as the signal has to pass through as few barriers as possible, and you’ll get much better overall performance.
- Experiment with channels
When you first set up a router, it will broadcast on a default frequency range, or router channel. If you live in the middle of nowhere, you may never need to change these settings. If, however, you live in an apartment or close-set housing development, you may find that your router’s wireless signal is conflicting with the same signal being broadcast by your neighbor. This is analogous to standing next to someone talking on his or her cell phone at the same time you’re trying to talk on yours. You’ll both end up talking louder in an attempt to drown the other out, or constantly losing your train of thought.
Changing the router channel can help avoid interference and conflicts from competing wireless devices, since this is a setting that most people never bother to adjust.
- Check appliances for conflicts
Remember, other devices in your home emit EM fields that can weaken or attenuate router performance. I once lived in an apartment that lost WiFi every time someone used the microwave. While most people don’t have cut-offs quite that extreme, where you put your WiFi in relation to other products can matter.
Remember, dual-band routers like 802.11ac devices use both the 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands to communicate. This allows them to vastly increase their performance, but only under ideal situations. If you lock the router behind multiple walls, the 5GHz signal will attenuate quickly.
- Use a WiFi extender (or build your own)
In some cases, there may be no alternative but to build or install a WiFi extender. There are several online guides about building your own WiFi signal-boosting device out of an aluminum can or tin foil parabola. In some cases, even a cooking strainer can be used to meaningfully improve WiFi performance.
If the DIY route doesn’t appeal to you, however, there’s always the option of buying a WiFi extension kit. These are typically wall plug devices with customized log-ins. You hook the device to your router for the initial setup and plug it in thereafter to any convenient wall socket in the house. In some cases, these devices are meant to pick up the WiFi signal from the router and rebroadcast it, while others take a wired Ethernet cable from the router. Either way, this hardware can double or triple the effective range of your WiFi network for relatively little cost.
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