Tips to Optimizing your Wi-Fi Network

Getting a Wi-Fi signal to every corner of your home or office can be a challenging task, especially if you have a large house or large office one with lots of thick walls. However, there are few tips that can improve your Wi-Fi coverage.

1) Placement/Arrangement

A wireless router (router) broadcasts Wi-Fi signals out in all directions. Think of the signal coverage as a globe with the router right at the center. Outside of this globe, clients won't get a signal. This globe, however, is not exactly spherical; one of the reasons is because the signals are generally tuned to disperse more horizontally than vertically, and like all radio signals, they tend to spread laterally and downward the farther they are from the transmitter. The best place to locate your wireless router or access point is an elevated spot in the center of your home/office.

If need be, hire a specialist to install a new outlet in the right place. If it's not possible to move the phone jack or run coax cable to where you want, use a long network cable to connect the router to the modem, leaving the modem where the jack is and the router/access point at the center of the house. (In my experience, it's actually quite easy to run cables in the crawl space above the ceiling, or under the house.)

A wireless signal works best outdoors in an open environment. Since it's not possible to have that indoors, you can improve the signal a great deal by making sure the immediate surroundings of the router/modem are clear, especially in the directions you want the signal to reach. This means you don't want to leave the router in a closet, or put it between a wall. The best place to leave the router is in midair, but since that's quite hard to do, the second best thing is to put it on the surface of a desk, or mount it on the wall when applicable. Generally, all physical objects, such as walls, glass doors and so on, weaken Wi-Fi signals, some more than others. 

With a router that comes with external antennas, you can slightly tweak the above-mentioned globe of coverage. Generally you want the antennas oriented vertically if you want the signal to go wide (which is the most popular usage). If the antennas are detachable, it's likely that you can replace them with high-gain antennas (most of the time this means bigger ones), which noticeably helps increase coverage. You might also be able to increase the power of the antennas, hence the range, by attaching to it a piece of aluminum foil curled up into a parabolic shape. For routers with an internal antenna design, there's not much you can do. Modern routers, especially N750, N900 and 802.11ac routers, generally come with very powerful and smart antennas that essentially increase their power toward the direction of connected clients automatically, using a technology called beam-forming.  

2) Equipment/Product type

If you have placed your router properly and still don't find enough improvement, it's time to check the equipment. Ideally you just want to have one wireless broadcaster at home/office, and for most offices/homes a single router is good enough. That said, if you have a small house/office or vice versa and the router (put in the middle) can't cover every corner, it's time to consider replacing it.

A separate access point is an ideal solution for a large and sprawling home/office, one in which you can't place the router in its center, or one with a deep basement, with an existing router. Basically, you have another router and want to put in a location where the signal of the existing router can't reach or gets really weak. 

There is also what we call range extender/repeater which are wireless devices that can connect to an existing Wi-Fi network and then rebroadcast that same network's signal farther. Most of these devices support Wi-Fi Protected Setup and can connect to the existing router with the push of a button; after that, you can just put one at the edge of the existing network's Wi-Fi range and have that range increased.

Using range extender/repeater depends on effectiveness. You need to put it relatively close to the existing router for it to have a good connection with the main network, but at the same time far enough for it to really extend the range. It's very hard to find the sweet spot for it to be effective both in terms of range and connection quality. The repeater basically duplicates the existing Wi-Fi network with one of its own, and as mentioned above, Wi-Fi signals are broadcast in all directions. This means devices in the area where the two networks overlap have to deal with interference and signal saturation. This is especially bad for the 2.4GHz band.  It is believed that a range extender/repeater is still the fastest way to relatively extend a Wi-Fi network's coverage.  

3. Settings

One of the problems with Wi-Fi networks is the risk of losing your bandwidth to unauthorized users. This part helps you secure your network and optimize it for speed. Note that it's slightly more advanced and might seem intimidating to novice users. But you will be a novice no more if you follow through with it.

With the exception of networking products from Apple, most other routers and access points on the market come with a Web interface. This means that from a connected computer, you can open up the router's management Web page by going to its IP address. Unless you have changed it, the default IP address is generally printed on the bottom of the router, or on its user guide, and tends to be in this format: 192.168.x.1.

It's easy to find out your router's IP address. Here are the common steps to get to any home/office network's router's Web interface: 

• From a connected computer (running Windows) search for "cmd" then press Enter. (If you use Windows XP, you can navigate the Start Menu and run the Command Prompt item). 
• Now in the black command prompt window, type in "ipconfig" then press Enter. You will see lots of information displayed in the window. Find the string of numbers that follows "Default Gateway" that's the router's IP address. 
• Type that IP address in the address bar of a browser such as Chrome or Firefox, and press Enter; now you are at the router's Web interface. You will have to log in with an account. The username is almost always admin; for the password, check the router's manual or ask the person who first set up the network for you.

On the Web interface, the following wireless settings will help your network stay safe:

Network name and password: Most if not all routers come with a default Wi-Fi network name (or SSID) and password; you won't want to use them. This is mostly because that reveals to advanced users which router you have and they can hacked into. So, for novice changing the SSID and password to your preference also helps make it secured.

Use WPA 2: Using the WPA 2 encryption method helps both increase the security and the speed of the Wi-Fi signal. The only catch is that WPA 2 might not be compatible with older clients. All new clients released in the past few years support WPA 2, however. you can try using WPA 2 first, and if some of your clients are unable to connect, switch it back to WPA.

Lastly, once you have accessed the router's Web interface, there are many other settings that you can try. For safety, there are also MAC address filters, Internet filtering and so on. Note that a router generally takes about a minute to restart to apply new settings.

Thank You.