Supercharge your WiFi in four free steps
Is slow WiFi frustrating you? Are you too broke to upgrade your internet service but desperately in need of more speed? Welcome to the club!
Fortunately, there are four no-cost steps to boost the speed (and reliability) of the WiFi connection in your home.
Get centred
The position of your WiFi router has a lot to do with the signal strength. For me, I dropped the router where the wired connection came in, and I never gave it a second thought. For others, they stashed the router out of sight, because, well hardware is ugly.
You can put function over form by moving your router to a central location. Walls (especially concrete walls with steel rods) are your router’s arch-nemesis and distance the nemesis sidekick.
Consider installing the router as high as is practical and away from other electronics (which may offer signal interference).
Cut access
Seems like an oxymoron, but to get better access, you should cut access. You’d be surprised at how many devices are pulling load off your WiFi - your TV, your tablet, your phone, your kid’s tablet and their game console, your spouse’s tablet, work phone, personal phone, smart watch, bedroom TV and kindle, your neighbour and that car that parks on the street in front of your home every afternoon.
Start over by changing the WiFi password. Kick everyone off. Then decide which devices you wish to allow access. Fewer devices equal faster WiFi.
Actually, you may want to repeat this step every couple of months.
Get bonus points for using wired connections where possible. Larger appliances like smart TVs and data hoggers like streaming boxes, often have an Ethernet port. Use it.
Reboot
A reboot is a go-to solution for a host of tech problems, including problems with WiFi. Disconnect the power to your router, wait five seconds and then reconnect.
Pulling the plug on the hardware has a powerful (no pun intended) effect on the software running the device. Tech people will say it clears the cache; the rest of us will say rebooting gets rid of the junk code mucking up the performance. Either way, it works.
Get technical
If you are comfortable with modifying advanced settings, you can do some tweaks to speed things up. You can:
Set dual-band routers to the 5GHz frequency to reduce interference
Update the router firmware to the latest version to improve performance and security
Spend some cash
If you’d rather spend your hard-earned money on new hardware than unreliable ISP’s you can:
Replace the antenna on your existing router
Replace your old router with a sleeker, faster model
Deploy extenders through your home
And, of course, you could call your ISP to bump up your internet package to the next tier.
Happy surfing.
