How To Improve Your WiFi Signal In Seven Easy Steps

Therefore, it is recommended to place the router in the exact center of your home or as close as possible so that the signal is distributed well throughout the house. If we put it, for example, in a room that is at one end of your house, the signal will have to go through many walls and distance to reach the furthest rooms, while if you put it in the center of the house, the signal will distribute more evenly.

It is also important to place the router in a relatively high position since it sends the waves downwards and if we do not do so, we will be wasting part of its reach. Come on, nothing to put it on the ground.

And finally, you have to take into account how you surround your router. For example, even if you have the router in the center of the house, it will be of little use if you place it inside a closet or in a false ceiling. The walls also limit the signal, so the more free of obstacles it is, the better the coverage will be in all areas of your home.

Position the antennas correctly

Although aesthetically we can believe that it is the best, if we want to optimize the signal of our router it is not recommended to put the two antennas up. Don’t worry if yours are like this, because it’s how they appear in almost all the manufacturer’s photos, and it’s a fairly common mistake that many of us make.

It is advisable to place the antennas perpendicular, one horizontal and the other vertical. An Apple engineer said it a few years ago, and he explained that radio reception is maximized when both the client and the access point match the polarization, come on when the antennas are oriented in the same plane.

The summary is that the antennas have to draw a 90-degree angle between them. No, with this trick you won’t see that your WiFi is now much faster, but it helps to improve coverage on our devices and they don’t suffer so much when they’re a bit far from the router.

Router firmware is always up to date

The firmware is an internal program of the devices that control the operation of their circuits, a kind of instructions that they have stored in their internal storage. From time to time, manufacturers release firmware updates to improve some of the features of their devices.

Therefore, it is important to ensure that your router’s firmware is always up to date. Some routers do this automatically so you don’t have to keep an eye on it. You can check if yours does it in its manual, and if not, you will have to update it yourself from the administration page of your router, using the IP 192.168.1.1 and 192.168.0.1 as we explained.

Choose between 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz WiFi

If you have a dual-band router, it’s also a good idea to know when to connect your devices to the 2.4 GHz band and the 5 GHz band. Each of these two bands has different characteristics, so one of the ways to improve the coverage and connection of your devices is precisely to know which one to connect each one to.

DIFFERENCES	2.4GHZ	5GHZ
CHANNELS	14 non-overlapping channels	25 non-overlapping channels
INTERFERENCE	more interference	less interference
MAXIMUM SPEED	Less connection speed	More connection speed
NETWORK RANGE	higher range	lower rank
STANDARD	IEEE 802.11b, 802.11g, 802.11n (B, G, and N)	IEEE 802.11a, 802.11n, 802.11ac (A, N, AC)

As you can see in this table that we have already shown you in the past when talking in depth about these two types of WiFi, the 2.4 GHz one usually has more interference, which makes the connection slower. It also has fewer channels, so all the devices are fighting over very little space. 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi also has a lower maximum connection speed, although they can go further with their coverage.

On the other hand, 5 GHz WiFi has less interference because it is less used, which makes it more agile, it has more channels to distribute among the devices and a higher maximum connection speed. Its negative point is that it has more trouble overcoming obstacles such as walls, so its coverage tends to be lower in many cases.

As for which band to choose with each device, if you have an old router you will only have the 2.4 GHz one, so there will be no headaches. But if you can choose, 5 GHz could be the most appropriate for devices where speed prevails over coverage or devices close to an outlet or the router itself, such as computers, game consoles, etc.

Meanwhile, 2.4 GHz could be more suitable for devices where coverage is more important, such as mobile phones and tablets. But these are just some assumptions, Once you know the characteristics you can decide for yourself depending on your needs which device you connect to which network, taking into account that some less modern devices may not be compatible with 5 GHz bands either.

Look for the least cluttered channels

On the same administration page of your router, often but not always on the same page where you change basic values ​​like SSID name, there is another option called Control Channel. It is used to choose one of the 13 channels on which your router can operate. Usually, it will be set to automatically choose the least congested channel, but this is an auto mode that is not always entirely reliable.

European WiFi routers use channels ranging from 1 to 13, which operate between 2,401 and 2,483 MHz. This means that if you live in a neighboring community, it is possible that there may be several routers operating on the same channel, and that their signals are interfering with yours taking away some range.

What you have to do is resort to free applications such as Wifi Analyzer for Android, which analyzes the status of the channels around you. In this application, for example, without giving any password, you can tell it what your router is from all those around you, and it will tell you what channel you are on and what is the recommended one right now.

With this, I have seen, for example, that the router has been automatically configured to use channel 1, but that the least congested channels with which the connection would be best are 8, 9, and 13. Come on, the automatic mode of the router does not have succeeded