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If you have a wireless network in your home, you may have a few dead-zones or areas with low connectivity. In this post, we want to cover a few tips that might help improve your wireless network.
Optimizing Placement
The placement of your router actually makes a difference. You want to put your wireless router in a central location within your home. You also want to put it in a place that is higher to minimize the likelihood of interference from physical obstructions like walls, furniture and appliances. You want to see if you can find a location that has as many unobstructed paths throughout the house.
You’ll also want to keep your wireless router away from any other wireless devices or electronic equipment like microwaves, televisions, even blue-tooth enabled devices and remote controls as electronic interference could also weak wireless signals.
Extending Range
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But even if you have found the optimal location in your home in a high place, with multiple paths cleared from physical and electronic obstructions, sometimes, it’s just not enough to get that signal to the far end of the house, or even upstairs.
In this situation a wireless repeater will be a big help. Wireless repeaters basically strengthen and extend your wireless signal which can, under ideal conditions, double the range of your wireless network. Results vary due to a number of factors.
There is another way that seems a bit stranger, and that’s using an existing wired “network” in your home to extend the range of your network and internet connectivity; you power lines. You can set up a power line network to get to those hard to reach places in the house, or those places with a lot of obstructions.
Fine Tuning
You can make use of your routers features to fine tune your wireless network. Most 802.11n routers can operate at either 2.4 GHz or 5 GHz, and while you may think that the 5 GHz is better just by virtue of it being a bigger number, you might be surprised to learn that the 2.4 GHz is a lot better at going through walls.
You may also want to make sure that you have an up to date router that supports 802.11n instead of just the usual g and b. It will extend your range and is reasonably financially feasible.
There are a few other tips and tweaks that you could use like using an external antenna to improve reception for your laptop, or checking to see if your wireless signal is “overlapping” with another router or device on the same channel using tools like WiFi Stumbler.
You’d be surprised at how small changes can have a large impact on the quality and range of your wireless service.
Related articles
- Amped Wireless High Power Wireless-N 600mW Gigabit Router (gadget.com)
- How Wi-Fi Works (mycricket.com)
- Amped Wireless’ latest routers can bathe a 10,000 square foot home in WiFi goodness (geek.com)
