Tips to Improve Your Home Wireless Network

We keep adding devices to our houses. Whether its just new computers or game consoles, phones, various IoT devices (Alexa, Ring, Hue etc...) we are increasingly adding congestion to the airwaves. 

Some might be tempted to go out and buy that shiny new Wifi 6 (802.11ax) router in hopes of improving their situation. But if your current router is only a few years old (Wifi 5 / 802.11ac) I invite you to try a few these items first. It may save you some money and help you understand where or what is causing your issues. 

5 Things to Try First

1. Proper Router Placement
2. Channel Selection
3. Channel Widths
4. Avoid turning up the power
   
5. Proper Device Placement

1. Proper Router Placement

This step alone can substantially improve your networks ability to communicate with your devices. When I walk in to a friends house or even a business I often see the access point stuffed in a corner, on a shelf or an entertainment center. It is also very often far away from where most people use their devices, generally in a living room or kitchen area and the bedrooms are across the house. As waves travel they lose energy, they also have limited capabilities to penetrate certain surfaces. Brick and stonework, glass and water being some of the biggest offenders. 

If you have a router that does not integrate the modem your best option is to purchase a longer network cable and place the router closer to either the center of the residence or closer to where the devices with the poorest signal are. A network cable can have a length of roughly 100 meters (~328ft) without needed the signal to be repeated. With this length at your disposal its possible to run it along the wall using stick on wire molding. No drilling or fishing required. 

To get a bit more technical, radio energy is exponential and often expressed in dBm or decibels per milliwatt. 3dBm increase is equivalent to doubling the power at the receiver or transmitter.

2. Channel Selection

In North America we have channels 1-11 available in 2.4GHz band. By using only channels 1, 6 and 11 we can prevent any overlap of the signal and improve the network by keeping interference down. If you were to use channel 8, you would cause channels 6-11 to be seen as busy and therefor unusable at that time. The one major caveat here is even if you set up your network properly, your neighbor might not and still cause unnecessary interference. 

For the 5GHz band we have far more options available to use. To save some text please check out this graphic created by the awesome people over at WLANPros.

        Source: WLANPros

Even though we have a much greater channel selection with 5GHz I would like to still make a a point about it. 

• Use DFS Channels: I have heard people talk about avoiding DFS channels at all costs. Unless you live right next to an airport or weather radar station there is no reason to not use these channels. Even if you do and for some reason there is radar detected in the area, the router and your devices will automatically move to a new channel. This is why they are called DFS channels. DFS stands for Dynamic Frequency Selection and the wireless standard implements a mechanism to tell devices they need to move to the new channel to continue communicating.

In a future post I would like to go over how to view your neighbors networks and further avoid channels that are in use or have already high utilization. 

 

3. Channel Widths

The width of the channel is exactly what it sounds like. How wide (or how much spectrum) the channel is going to use. 2.4GHz will give you the option to use 20MHz or 40MHz channels. Please never use 40MHz. There is only one non overlapping channel available and using will cause the unnecessary utilization and overlap all the 20MHz channels in that band. It might even degrade your performance rather than improve it as well.

 

When it comes to 5GHz we have 4 options. 20, 40, 80 and 160MHz. Depending on your needs I would stick with 40MHz. Using an iPhone as an example, it has an 802.11AX 2X2 radio. The 2X2 means it has 2 receive and 2 transmit antennas or spatial streams. If we assume you have a mediocre signal of -71 dBm and you are using 40MHz channels, the max available bandwidth is about 120Mbps. This about 4-5 times the requirement for streaming 4K video which needs anywhere from 25-50Mbps (Source: Netflix). Note that this bandwidth to that particular device and routers are capable of changing this per device. Total bandwidth needed for a certain number of devices is well beyond the scope of this article and it generally not a concern for the vast majority of home users. 

Not only will 40MHz cover the majority of your speed needs it will also allow you more opportunities to select a channel that is not used or at least not very utilized. 

4. Avoid Turning Up the Power

This also alludes to the first point about router placement. When people see their device has a low or poor signal they assume turning up the power will help the problem. This is not always the case and can cause more issues to arise. Routers/Access Points are specialized hardware engineered to perform a specific task. Transmit and Receive radio signals. Our devices are usually not specialized for this task and perform a number of other functions. 

 

A phone for example is not just there to send and receive signals, it also has a touchscreen, operating system, camera and countless other functions that need to run and are fighting for processing and battery power. This limits the amount of power it can draw for transmitting signals, if it cant acknowledge to the router it has received the message the router will re-transmit it at a lower rate. The re transmission of data causes extra and unnecessary utilization of the channel.

Another problem is when everyone in the neighborhood sets their 2.4GHz radios to max or high power. These signals travel much farther and with the limited number of channels available and the ever present problem of overlap, more routers will now see the channel as being busy and will be unable to transmit to its own devices. Best practice is to set the 2.4GHz band to low power and see how devices react. 

5. Proper Device Placement

This one might seem obvious but again, I see it often walking through various spaces. Devices that need wireless connectivity should not be tucked in the corner, below or within other objects or furniture. I know your desk may look nice and clean with your laptop docked and tucked away but you are not helping it by doing so. Same goes for the game console stuffed in the entertainment center. Another easy fix for you streaming media lovers is to not buy the stick version of something. Whether its a Roku or FireTV, buy one that can be moved out from behind the TV for better reception. Another option is a short Female to Male HDMI cable so you move it to a more desirable spot. Even a small increases in signal strength can turn a device that performs OK into something you wont think twice about when youre in the middle of that newly released episode. 

Give it a shot

I hope I was able to give you some things to think about. Or at the very least make you want to learn more about wireless technology. If you were already aware of these tips then stick around because I hope to write more in depth posts about specific aspects of wireless and do some testing with results as well.