Optimizing Your Home Wi-Fi Network: Troubleshooting, Settings, and Upgrades

In today’s world, a reliable internet connection is as essential as water and electricity. We often take our Wi-Fi networks for granted, rarely considering the complex technology that makes it all possible. However, Wi-Fi isn’t always perfect. Many users experience issues like weak signal strength, dropped connections, slow speeds, and inconsistent performance. Fortunately, there are several steps you can take to improve your home Wi-Fi network, from tweaking router settings to upgrading your hardware.

Understanding Router Settings

Most routers offer a range of customizable settings that can significantly impact your Wi-Fi performance. While the specific options vary depending on the router model, some common settings include channel width, channel selection, and band steering.

Channel Width: Channel width determines how much of the available frequency spectrum is used for communication between your router and connected devices. Narrower channels allow for more channels overall, which can reduce interference from neighboring networks. Wider channels, on the other hand, can provide faster speeds by allowing more data to be transmitted at once, but only if the signal strength is sufficient.

Many routers can automatically select the optimal channel width. If your router supports this feature, it’s generally best to let it handle the selection process. However, if you want to experiment with manual settings, start with the widest channel width available (e.g., 160MHz on the 5GHz band) and gradually reduce it until you find the best balance between speed and stability.

Channel Selection: Depending on the channel width you’ve chosen, there will be a different number of channels to choose from. A wider channel width often corresponds to a lower total number of available channels. The 2.4GHz band is generally limited to 20MHz or 40MHz channels. The 20MHz is usually preferrable, as it avoids overlapping with nearby networks. In ideal situations with minimal interference, 40MHz channel width may function appropriately.

Routers can typically automatically select a channel with the least amount of "noise" or interference. This is often the best approach. However, if you’re experiencing connectivity problems in a specific area of your home, it may be worth manually selecting a different channel, especially if you notice that a neighboring network is using the same channel.

Band Steering: Modern routers operate on both the 2.4GHz and 5GHz frequency bands. The 2.4GHz band offers greater range and better wall penetration, while the 5GHz band provides faster speeds but is more susceptible to interference and distance limitations.

Most routers create a single network name (SSID) that devices use to connect. The router or the devices themselves then determine which frequency band to use. This usually works well, but you may encounter situations where manually separating the networks is beneficial.

For example, some older smart home devices only support the 2.4GHz band. If you’re having trouble connecting these devices, creating a separate 2.4GHz network can resolve the issue. Similarly, some devices may stubbornly connect to the 5GHz band even when the signal is weak, leading to poor performance. In such cases, forcing these devices to connect to the 2.4GHz network can improve their stability and reliability.

Many routers have a feature called band steering, which automatically selects the optimal frequency band for each device based on factors like signal strength and network congestion. If you’re an advanced user, some routers offer more granular control over band steering behavior. However, it’s important to have a solid understanding of networking principles before making manual adjustments.

Quality of Service (QoS)

Quality of Service (QoS) is a feature found in many high-end routers that prioritizes network traffic to ensure smooth performance for critical applications. Without QoS, bandwidth-intensive activities like file downloads or streaming video can saturate your internet connection and cause lag or buffering for other devices.

QoS can be used to prioritize specific types of traffic, such as online games or video calls. By prioritizing these applications, you can minimize lag and ensure a more responsive experience.

Routers with powerful processors often perform well even without QoS enabled. However, if you’re experiencing network congestion or performance issues, enabling QoS can be a helpful solution.

Problems that can be solved with QoS are often due to something called bufferbloat, where the router queues up too many packets and can’t forward them all in a reasonable time. A faster connection won’t help, and incorrect router settings can make it worse.

You can test for bufferbloat at dslreport.com or waveform.com. If you have a lot of bufferbloat, enable QoS. If you can’t find the settings for your particular router, search for “[router model] qos” and you’ll probably get both an answer to whether it has the feature at all and, if so, how to enable it.

Network Analysis and Troubleshooting

If optimizing your router settings doesn’t resolve your Wi-Fi problems, the next step is to analyze your network and identify potential bottlenecks. Tools like Netspot can help you map your Wi-Fi signal strength throughout your home, revealing areas with weak coverage.

To use Netspot, you’ll need a floor plan of your home and a laptop. Once you’ve installed the program and launched it, select the Survey tab and create a new project. Upload your floor plan or draw it manually, then calibrate the distances to ensure accurate measurements.

Carry your laptop to different locations in your home and let Netspot measure the signal strength. The results are displayed as a color-coded chart, with warmer colors indicating stronger signals and cooler colors indicating weaker signals. This information can help you identify optimal locations for your router or Wi-Fi extenders.

If your problems don’t seem to be due to a weak signal, it could be that you are utilising the full capacity of your Wi-Fi network with many connected devices.

Hardware Upgrades

If you’ve exhausted all software-based troubleshooting steps and your Wi-Fi problems persist, it may be time to consider upgrading your hardware.

One simple solution is to connect desktop computers and other stationary devices to your network using Ethernet cables. This frees up bandwidth on your Wi-Fi network and can significantly improve performance for wireless devices.

If you need to expand your Wi-Fi coverage, a Wi-Fi repeater or mesh router system can be effective. A Wi-Fi repeater extends an existing network by creating its own network with the same name (SSID). Newer models can connect either by cable or wirelessly. The latter is obviously more flexible, but offers slower speeds and longer response times as devices connected to the extension communicate with the router in two stages.

Wi-Fi repeater is the name of an older technology that is not as common today, where a radio intercepts the signal from the router and simply sends it out again. It rarely gets much better and I do not recommend it.

Mesh router systems consist of multiple base stations that work together to create a seamless Wi-Fi network. The base stations connect to each other wirelessly, either using a dedicated backhaul channel or intelligently managing traffic to minimize interference.

For those who have Wi-Fi problems with a regular router and want a simple solution, a mesh system with two or three base stations is often the simplest solution, but rarely the cheapest. Use Netspot to find the best placement of base stations, then just sit back and enjoy.

Some traditional routers now have a built-in mesh function so you can expand your network afterwards with compatible base stations. Asus, for example, has a feature called AI Mesh, while TP-Link calls its equivalent Onemesh. Both of these manufacturers are flexible with what additional devices you use as base stations, such as another regular router, a mesh router, or a dedicated Wi-Fi extender that supports the mesh system.

Unlike regular Wi-Fi extenders, all devices in one of these mesh networks must be from the same manufacturer and support the mesh technology in question.

When setting up a mesh network, it’s important to position the base stations so that they have the best possible signal to each other. This means that their signals should overlap but not too much, and there should be as few walls as possible in the straight line between two base stations.

By carefully optimizing your router settings, analyzing your network performance, and upgrading your hardware when necessary, you can achieve a more stable, faster, and more reliable Wi-Fi network that meets the demands of your connected home.