If you’re still having issues with your personal setup, or you can’t quite figure this all out, leave a note in the comments and I’ll be happy to help you troubleshoot.Here is a list of Best Free WiFi Analyzer Software for Windows. It’s a little confusing, I know, but hopefully this demystifies the process a bit. These are all things you’ll want to test out, of course, but now you know you can (and should) analyse your surrounding location to figure out the best way to configure your wireless network. It might also be the trick that gives you better wireless performance, depending on the setup of competing networks around you. It’s a trade-off, though drop your wifi network’s channel width to a lower value, and you might encounter less interference at the cost of overall performance. This is getting pretty detailed, but I wanted to call out channel width - and let you know that it’s a setting you might be able to manually force - because it can impact your wireless network’s performance. Or, worse, your wireless network could be affecting everyone else, when it normally wouldn’t if you “stayed in your lane” with a wireless network that overlaps fewer channels. However, if other nearby networks are using the same wifi channels, they could affect your performance as well. That’s great if there aren’t any other networks interfering with your 40MHz (or greater) wireless network. To put it in technical terms, your router might be using channel bonding, which combines multiple adjacent channels together to give you even faster speeds. Scan your space, and you might see a graph that looks something like this:Īs part of your wifi scanning, you might also notice that your network is overlapping a larger number of channels than other wifi networks. I’ve previously shared my love for Wifi Analyser (Windows) and Wifi Explorer (Mac), though Mac users should also check out NetSpot if you don’t want to pay $30.99. To figure out your wireless situation, all you need to do is grab a free wireless scanning app. Immediately after I ran Speedtest and got 87Mbps.” Using Wifi Analyser showed I was on Channel 6 along with about 6 others.Ĭhannel 11 only one had one other, so I changed my wifi signal to use channel 11. “I recently moved into a condo and have a 100mbps plan, but my wifi was only getting 4Mbps using Speedtest. The more interference you have to deal with from competing networks and devices, the slower your performance might be. This whole “channels” bit is important, because you want your wireless networks to live on channels that have as few competing networks as possible. Just turn off DHCP and DNS on the second one so your primary WAP does it for both.”ĬloudTrax” loading=”lazy” > Illustration: Michael Gauthier, CloudTraxĢ5 channels for 5GHz wifi (20MHz each, though you’ll only typically see up to 12 options, each 40MHz wide, in your router’s settings) Many owners never change their WAP from the default channel and are using the same one as their neighbours.įor your issue about not getting 5GHz to other parts of the house due to range, you can add a second WAP wired to the first. “As a follow up article you may want to address the WiFi channels. Lifehacker reader Lee recently wrote to us about a specific aspect of wireless networking giving him trouble. It’s a confusing topic if you want the best range and fastest speeds for your devices, and I wager that most people simply do whatever their routers tell them to do during the setup process, connect to whatever network gets created, and call it a day (for better or worse). Clearly, a bunch of Lifehacker readers have issues getting wireless networking to work - whether you’re trying to connect from a long distance away, you’re getting crappy speeds on your devices, or you’re frustrated because there are 300 different wireless networks irradiating your apartment.
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