Speed up your home WiFi with 3 tips from Patrick Norton

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• published: 07 Mar 2016
• views: 329

I hear complaints CONSTANTLY about WiFi... it's too slow, it's slow in that corner of the house. It never works in the living room, videos in the TV upstairs are low res or stutter.... Fortunately, there are a lot of things you can try tune up your network! First up, I'll be honest, if I can run an Ethernet cable to something that needs an Internet connection, especially stuff that runs HD video, like an Apple TV, ROKU box or HDTV... I run that cable. It's fast, it never drops out, and as long as the dog doesn't chew through the cable, it just about never has a problem. Bonus: all that traffic stays off the WiFi network! Second, all too often routers are stuffed in a closet in some far corner of your house. If this sounds like your home, do yourself a favor, and try to get it out in the open, as high as possible with as few walls between it and the rest of the house as you can manage. Get it up high, the higher the better more often than not, and try pointing one antenna vertically and one horizontally if it has a couple of external antennas. If you're running 802.11n, you might want to try connecting via 802.11g instead. I've seen throughput speeds double. In theory N should be faster, but in the real world it doesn't always work out. Matter of fact, wireless networking can just be weird... I hated 802.11n until I bought a new 802.11ac router... whether it was better radios or the beam forming antennas in the newer router or the faster processor... I was able to use the 802.11n in my old laptop in the far corners of my house for the first time... and the 802.11ac WiFi in my new laptop delivered a serous boost in speed. It's not always necessary to buy a new router to speed up your WiFI, but if your router is more than a couple years old, you might benefit from an upgrade. And if you've got new gear that has 802.11AC built in, it's definately time to upgrade your router... best of all, some of the least expensive AC routers out there deliver excellent performance.­ There's lots more to experiment with... checking to see if you and all your neigbors are running on the same WiFi channel... but definately try moving the router first. And, hey, try moving it to another location or three before you give up! SUBSCRIBE FOR THE LATEST VIDEOS http://www.youtube.com/subscription_center?add_user=DigitalTrends VISIT DIGITAL TRENDS http://www.digitaltrends.com/ CHECK OUT OUR LATEST PODCAST http://www.digitaltrends.com/podcasts/ https://www.facebook.com/digitaltrendsftw https://twitter.com/digitaltrends https://plus.google.com/+digitaltrends/posts