It’s unusual for our home Wi-Fi system to have been set up to cope with multiple people working or studying from home and for our increased use of the internet for streaming services. The good news is that you don’t have to put up with poor Wi-Fi connectivity anymore. There are lots of things you can do to improve the situation and I’m going to talk about the top 5 that sorted out my Wi-Fi issues.
This blog post has grown out of a talk I did for the networking group SME Force For Good on the 18th of February. This group runs informative and fascinating talks on alternat Friday mornings, with a round of networking afterwards. If you have a small business and want to get involved, then check out the Facebook group and come along to the next meeting: https://www.facebook.com/groups/smeforceforgood/about
WHAT IS WI-FI
Wi-Fi uses electromagnetic radiation at radio frequencies to send information between devices. Wi-Fi is a collection of wireless network protocols which allow different devices to ‘talk’ to each other by transmitting information. It allows you to connect your phone to the world wide web via your access point, your router. We are not going to go into detail of how this is done in this blog, but a bit of understanding of Wi-Fi will help with the 5 fixes.
Wi-Fi now uses three different parts of the electromagnetic spectrum at 2.4GHz, 5GHz lower and 5GHz upper frequencies. Frequency is a property of electromagnetic radiation that tells you how quickly the wave oscillates. Different frequencies give the electromagnetic radiation different properties. For example, television signals, light and x-rays are all electromagnetic waves they just have different frequencies. The frequencies chosen by Wi-Fi allow a good amount of information to be transmitted at a low power that will work well in your building, but be strongly absorbed by the walls.
HOW DOES WI-FI TRAVEL
Electromagnetic waves propagate by expanding outwards in all directions from the source. As they move away from the source, they lose energy and get weaker. How they travel outwards depends on the antenna used by the source. In this case we are talking about the antenna on your router, which is an omni directional antenna designed to send the signal out equally in all directions.
However, in a building we have further issues with the propagation of the Wi-Fi signal as we have furniture and walls and floors and ceilings that get in the way and absorb the RF signal. This means getting signal to your extension, or upstairs can be an issue for your Wi-Fi set up as the signal sent out of your router is not strong enough to avoid being fully absorbed on the way.
I’m going to use our house as an example as it’s not a good house to set up with Wi-Fi. We live in a 1900 brick-built terrace, with the old coal hole and outdoor toilet converted into a kitchen. Our house is very long and thin with a lot of thick walls to absorb the Wi-Fi. Below is a plan of the house from a birds eye view, the living and dining room are on the right, and the kitchen extension on the left. If we put our router where the internet supply comes into the house, the signal doesn’t reach the kitchen!
1 ROUTER IN THE MIDDLE
To get your Wi-Fi signal to cover your whole home I recommend you move the router into the middle of the volume you are trying to get Wi-Fi over. As you can see from the picture below, when we did this, we got better Wi-Fi in the kitchen.
There is more than just the ground floor to our house, so I’m going to move to a 3-dimensional view looking from the side of the house with the router in the same place. The living and dining room are now bottom right, and the kitchen bottom left.
As you can see the Wi-Fi coverage still wasn’t great, and the signal in the far end of the kitchen and the bathroom could definately be improved.
2 MULTIPLE ACCESS POINTS
To solve the coverage in the far reaches of the house we added multiple access points with mesh Wi-Fi. We now have three Wi-Fi points: one in the living room, one in the kitchen and one in the bedroom. These are all connected via a network of ethernet cables using the eero system and give us amazing Wi-Fi coverage throughout the house (including the loft!).
Not only does this give us a mesh Wi-Fi system that covers the whole house, but we also have a network port to plug into in each of these rooms. This means when I’m doing a talk from the bedroom or a tap class from the kitchen I have un-interrupted internet not reliant on Wi-Fi.
The eero mesh system is super easy to set up and you can get it from amazon: https://amzn.to/3arJBjw
The eero system needs an ethernet cable linked to your router to work, and this may not be possible in all buildings. You can buy Wi-Fi extenders that plug into a power socket to extend your Wi-Fi reach by re-transmitting it. There are various good and bad reports about these systems, I don’t have any recommendations as it’s not something I tried personally.
As Wi-Fi works in a free frequency band, the competition for the amount of information you can transmit is quite high. The bandwidth, which dictates how much information you can transmit per second, is limited and has to be shared by all the devices transmitting at this frequency. This means that if you live in a densely populated area, you will see a lot of different Wi-Fi, I can see 20! This means that however great your Wi-Fi coverage in your house is you may find your Wi-Fi signal dropping out at popular times of the day. There are 2 ways to solve this which I’ll cover in points 3 and 4.
3 USE A DIFFERENT FREQUENCY
Originally Wi-Fi only transmitted in the 2.4GHz band, which is a band that you can freely transmit on. However, most other devices that need to transmit use this frequency as well. As more devices used this band to transmit, things like Bluetooth, microwave ovens etc it became very crowded and the devices are competing for bandwidth to transmit information over. This is why you can lose your Wi-Fi signal if your device is next to your microwave whilst it heats up your tea. To try and combat this Wi-Fi has moved up to using the next free band at 5GHz as well to try and get more bandwidth with which to transmit more information.
I would recommend using a router that works in the 2 and 5GHz regions, preferably the 5GHz upper band. If you use a tool such as inSSIDer you can see how many other routers you can see on the 2GHz and the 5GHz networks, there will be many more in the 2GHz regions and it is likely to be overcrowded. The eero system allows you to use both frequencies, so you can move up to the 5GHz and be happy being one of the few people there. It works at the 5GHz upper band, which is even less populated, out of the 20 Wi-Fi networks I can see we are the only one on this band. If you can’t use the mesh eero system, you can buy a single unit to use as your router giving you access to all the frequency bands you want: https://amzn.to/3bgAt0e
It is worth noting that signals at 5GHz, are more strongly absorbed so you might find you are more in need of a mesh system at these frequencies or that your devices will adaptively move between the 2 and 5GHz systems to give you the best coverage.
4 DON’T USE WI-FI
Yes, that’s right. Solve your Wi-Fi issues by not using it!
Ok, hear me out here. If you connect static devices using an ethernet cable, think your TV, work desk, games console etc not only will you get superior internet access on these devices, but you also free up your Wi-Fi for the devices that can only use Wi-Fi. We have our TV, and our desks hard wired with ethernet cables.
One issue with hard wiring your laptop with ethernet is the number of ports you have available. As modern laptops don’t tend to have a built in ethernet connection you need to use a dongle and one of your usb ports to connect via ethernet. My machine only has 3 ports, so if I have ethernet, power, webcam, external monitor and keyboard I ran out of ports ages ago. To get round this I use an anker USBC hub adapter. This gives me 3 USB ports, an ethernet point and a hdmi all in one USB C port on my laptop, meaning I can connect most things to my laptop in just one port. You can get some that do power as well, but I have power through my monitor. This is the one I use: https://amzn.to/3anV7w0
5 THINK WHEN TO UPLOAD
The last point is to be wary about the times you use the bandwidth you have available to you for non-time critical tasks. If you kick off doing a large upload to the cloud over Wi-Fi just before you start an online video chat, you are going to have serious connectivity and video issues. This is not just a Wi-Fi issue, your internet provider gives you limited upload and download rates, often the upload limit is quite small as we tend to use this less. We do more streaming of films and music than we do updating to the cloud. So, even if you are doing your upload over ethernet you may exceed your upload limit and give yourself issues in your zoom call. So, I would recommend doing your uploads overnight to keep the bandwidth free for what you want to use if for during the day.
I hope you find these tips useful and you get your Wi-Fi running smoothly at all corners of your home.
If you want to watch the talk that inspired this blog post, then have a watch of the video below.
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