It will not surprise anyone that internet usage has surged dramatically within the past few weeks, because of people isolating and working from home.
Streaming platforms have had to hamper their speeds to deal with the influx of demand, and a few ISPs have pledged to lift data caps, waive fees, and delay contract terminations for people that cannot pay their internet bills.
If you’re stuck reception and experiencing painfully slow internet speeds, here are a couple of quick tricks you’ll attempt to give your Wi-Fi a lift.
- Check where your router is The best place to place your router is during a central open location so it can reach every corner in your house without obstructions. Placing it somewhere sort of a cupboard or within the corner of your room will hamper your internet strength significantly.
It might not be practical to only plop your router within the middle of your house, but if you’ll find an open space to place it and therefore the cabling works in your favor then you ought to definitely move it (and then sit right next thereto for best results).
- Check for possible interference together with your Wi-Fi connection
Wi-Fi routers transmit and receive data on a frequency, which suggests that its electromagnetic waves can clash with other devices on an identical frequency.
Avoid setup of your wi-fi router near anything big and metallic, like microwaves and refrigerators, and be wary of other wireless devices like keyboards and CCTV cameras which will interfere together with your Wi-Fi connection.
Refrain from putting your router near water too, although you’d need quite a lot quite a glass of water to obstruct it.
- Kick out unwanted Wi-Fi guests and add a secure password.
Your router’s account password shouldn’t be a “password.” Or 12345678, for that matter. If you’re the Wi-Fi admin, you ought to set a secure password (use a password generator if stuck). that ought to force anyone who has been hogging your Wi-Fi to possess to check in again if you ought to allow them to. - Prioritize what your bandwidth is employed for.
Sometimes it’s not an individual taking over your bandwidth, but an app or a bit of software that just hogs all of your bandwidth, leaving you stuck loading an easy webpage for minutes on end.
You can fix this by prioritizing which applications you would like to offer more bandwidth to by going into your router’s Quality of Service settings.
To change your router’s Quality of Service settings, simply log into your router’s admin and locate and alter the QoS settings as you see fit, and restart your router.
- Upgrade to 5GHz.
If you don’t have a router that supports 5GHz (not to be confused with 5G cellular service), we strongly recommend you get one. 2.4GHz waveband on a router is more sensitive to radio interference from your digital appliances, and 5GHz will provide you quicker speeds. - Keep your software up-to-date
This may sound sort of a broken record to you, but updating your router, and any app or software for that matter, may help increase not just your speeds, but it also provides enhance network security with software patches to new malware. - Connect via your Ethernet cable
Last, but never least, physically connecting your device to the web will inevitably provide you with faster speeds.
This could be difficult if you’ve got a couple of people sharing one router, but if you would like the fastest internet possible, be it for gaming or streaming, connecting your laptop to your router with a coaxial cable will offer you a stronger, faster internet connection.
You’d be limited physically by where you’ll put your router though, and where you’ll situate yourself as you’ll need to be sitting on the brink of it.
A security and privacy boost: A VPN-compatible router
Speed feels paramount once we use the web, so sometimes security and privacy can desire an afterthought. Speed is important. So is your privacy and security.
Encrypting your data on all of your devices to stop ISPs and malicious actors from peering into your activity is growing increasingly important given what proportion work you’re now doing on your home Wi-Fi network.
Getting a VPN-compatible router (like ours) can offer you comprehensive protection over all of your home devices without getting super finicky with the router. It’s pretty simple.