If, like me, you eventually got annoyed by how choppy and frankly slow your home Wi-Fi can become, then this post may be for you.
Does your Wi-Fi feels much slower than you expect it to be? Is it typically slow at the times when your neighbours are also at home, just after work for example, on weekends? Does it perform better when most of your neighbours are asleep? In the affirmative in some of these questions, you may be experiencing Wi-Fi channel overcrowding.
If channel overcrowding is the issue, here is a simple way to solve it:
- Identify a channel that is less busy or not at all
- Configure your router to use this free channel
- Restart it. Et voila.
Here is how a crowded channel looks like
In the picture, you see a lot of coloured areas between 1-8 (numbers at the bottom of the picture), these are wi-fi channel numbers. If your router’s name shows in this area you are likely to have a poor reception. The solution is to move to a quieter channel. In the picture, you see that channels above 108 are totally free. Look at your wi-fi router documentation, look for the word “channel” and find out you to change it. If your router is not able to use the desired channel, it may be because it’s too old for example. If you find that all the channels in your area are too busy then you are out of luck, as far as this tip is concerned.
Tools
In my example, I am using a Mac and and I found a program in Apple Store called WiFi Explorer. The picture in this post is a screenshot from this app. If you are using a PC, I am sure there would be an equivalent available somewhere – be safe though, free software from an obscure or unchecked source may be malware. If this kind of tool isn’t something for you, then the good old trial & error method might be a way to do it. Just set your Wi-Fi router to another channel, restart it, check how it performs. Repeat the process until you stumble into a channel that works for you.
Background
In residential areas, most of your neighbours also have wi-fi at home. More often than not, you may just drowning out each other’s wi-fi network with unwanted noise. Think of it this way, try to have a cozy conversation with someone in the middle of a busy shopping street and the two of you are 15 meters apart. What’s more, people have different voices that can be heard, the situation is different with wi-fi routers.
People get wi-fi at home either by directly obtaining it from their cable internet provider, or by buying wi-fi routers and installing that themselves on top of their wired Internet connection. It’s easy to do. The hope is that it’s going to be super fast as your provider relentlessly has been touting. At some point, a reality slowly start to sink in, your Internet connection is nowhere near as fast as you were told. Then follows annoyance, frustration, a little bit of guilty denial and ultimately resignation to accept the status quo – so-called Stockholm Syndrome.
A common cause of sluggish and fluctuating wi-fi network performance is the overcrowding of the allotted channels. Since most neighbours are likely to get wi-fi from the same providers, they all get the same routers with the exact same default settings. This means that the routers will be constantly interfering, causing noise that slows down and sometimes interrupt your network.
Aside
Although I am talking about possible Wi-fi interference here, it is by far not the only reason behind sluggish or unreliable home network. Another culprit may be typically deception from cable providers. It is well documented that residential Internet connection providers frequently throttle their users bandwidth, it’s easy to find out. And naturally, when lots of people are on the Internet, for example following an event, networks could become slower for everybody for a certain amount of time. It’s all more complicated than we often make of it. This is just a tip that may help if you are lucky to be meeting the conditions that I mentioned.