Tips to Improve Your Home’s WiFi Signal

In this wonderful utopia of portable computing devices, smartphones and the new “Internet of Things,” WiFi makes it all possible. But, you don’t need to live in a giant sprawling mansion to experience frustration with your home WiFi signal.  It’s wonderful until your device isn’t connecting or the speed is slow.  Thankfully there are a few things that you can do to make your home network signal work better. Here are a few tips.

WiFi

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  • Put your WiFi router near the center of your home.  Those seemingly magical WiFi radio waves actually do have trouble going through walls, especially concrete ones or those packed with wires. Try to put as few walls between your WiFi router and where you do most of your computing.
  • Get a newer router. WiFi has gone through many incarnations. You may see newer routers listed as 802.11a/b/g/n/ac .  This means that the router can speak to devices using any of those protocols.  But if you have a wireless card in your laptop, for example, that can take advantage of the “n” speed waves, but your router is old and can only put out the older, slower, 802.11a waves, then you aren’t utilizing the capabilities of your wireless card. For a good selection of WiFi routers, Dell is a good shopping choice.  They sell both consumer grade and business grade products.
  • Get a range extender/ repeater.  This is a gadget that does what it’s name implies, it gives more range to your system. One or more of these hooked up in a building will make the signal stronger.
  • Secure your wireless connection. An open wireless connection is like an invitation to anyone within 500 yards to share your internet connection. Despite being a major security issue, it will slow you down to have neighbors or strangers using your connection.
  • Use ad-blocker plugins on your web browsers to cut down on the amount of data that loads per web page.  Webmasters often rely on revenue from advertising,  so you could be kind to them and use the ones that let some safe, non-obtrusive ads come through, while blocking most banner ads and pop-up ad windows.
  • Use good old fashion Ethernet on your desktop computers, or laptops on desks. Ethernet is much faster than wireless. If you plug-in for your network connection, those devices will be able to utilize more bandwidth, while freeing up bandwidth in the wireless part of your network.
  • Know when to blame the ISP. Plug a computer straight into your cable or DSL modem, with an Ethernet cable, and do an online internet speed test several times. If your actual speed is significantly less than what your service provider is charging you for, give them a call and ask them to perform line diagnostics. Bad lines in your home or neighborhood could greatly reduce your speed.  If you contact them about it, it just may get fixed and your internet speed, both wired and wireless will improve.

Follow these few tips and your wireless internet connection will be faster and more reliable.  You just may feel like you got a service upgrade.

Ryan

About Author
Ryan is Tech blogger. He contributes to the Blogging, Gadgets, Social Media and Tech News section on TechKraze.

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