Steve Dotto here.
How the heck are you this fine day?
Me?
Well, if the truth be known, I am feeling somewhat hard done by.
Why am I feeling hard done by?
you may well ask.
Well, it all kind of stems from last night.
We’re sitting down with the family watching the NetFlix, enjoying a little bit of R and
R time with NetFlix.
All of a sudden, the NetFlix does not work.
There’s something wrong with the internet or WiFi, who knows.
But the family turns to me and says, “What’s wrong with the WiFi?”
like I know and they expect me to have the answer right there or they blame me for the
WiFi not working.
What did you do to the WiFi?
Do you have this in your life?
Yes, you do.
You know exactly what I’m speaking about.
Now I don’t think I’m going to be able to change the attitude of all of our family
towards us and WiFi.
What I can do in this particular episode is I can talk to you about making your WiFi a
wee bit more robust, making it a little more reliable, some things you can do to improve
WiFi performance in your house today on DottoTech.
Actually, it turns out that getting the best out of your WiFi is a fairly simple matter
in most homes.
There really aren’t that many variables in setting up your WiFi.
I thought there would be a lot more tricks that I learned but really it comes down to
a signal strength.
It comes down to distance and how you get your signal through into your different areas
in your home.
Here’s the one thing that kind of surprised me: I thought that as long as your router
was centrally located in your home so it’s kind of equally distanced from all of the
different corners that you might want WiFi in, you’re probably okay.
That is partially true.
The actual surprise came from the fact that if you’ve got that router in the basement,
you’re going to have a weaker signal upstairs.
If you have that router high up as possible in the house, you’re going to have a much
stronger signal through your whole house because it’s turns out that WiFi signals go out
and down, not out and up very well.
So they go better down rather than up.
So making sure your router is as highly positioned as you can even if it’s in the corner of
the house, putting it up high, that’s going to help an awful lot.
So that’s kind of tip number one.
The next thing about considering your issues with your WiFi router is you should probably
take a step back and say well wait a minute, how good is my connection to the internet?
Now we all paid for a variety of different packages from our internet service provider.
I pay for upgraded service so that I have higher upload and download speeds because
I use it for work as well as for home so I expect to have pretty good performance but
I should test that from time to time, especially at times when I might be having some issues.
I always go to this site here which is SpeedTest.net and I do a test maybe once a month or so whenever
I think about it.
Remember that the ISPs are selling you a package.
They’re offering you and telling you that they’re going to perform at a certain level
based on what you’re paying for your internet service so you should be checking this from
time to time.
Now going through the site is a little bit of a minefield because it’s one of the most
advertising rich sites on the planet and they kind of fool you.
If you click on Start now, since I’m on a Mac, they want to scan my Mac and start
selling me some utility software so you have to be careful that you don’t click on the
wrong place here.
But click on the Begin Test and let’s take a look at what my upload and download speeds
are.
Now I am in Delta, BC so I use a service called Eastlink.
Now I pay for upgraded service.
Look, I’m getting over 30 Mb per second download which is exactly kind of the sweet
spot of where I’m expecting to be.
I’m expecting to be 30 to 40 Mb download and I’m expecting to be around 7 Mb upload
speed and yes, I’m ranking just at about that.
I pay a little bit extra for this level of service but making sure that you have this
throughput is important if you’re making decisions.
If you’ve got a home and you’re struggling with the WiFi signal not being strong enough
to support NetFlix or whatever you happen to be doing, the most likely culprit is going
to be your actual connection to the Internet.
Your WiFi signal will certainly be a part of that but your connection to the internet
is going to be the biggest part of the story.
So now we’re rather well positioned so we’ve got hopefully good signal strength throughout
the house or we know what’s going on there.
If you don’t have good signal strength through the house, then getting a WiFi repeater, getting
a repeater and positioning it strategically so that you get good coverage is the next
kind of step and building the layers and you know what your connection to the internet
looks like.
The next thing to consider is congestion.
Basically, it’s always rush hour when everybody is home on the Internet.
Think about a home of four people.
If everybody’s got a smartphone and two or three other people have a tablet of some
sort, mostly you will have either your own notebook or a desktop computer of your own
and then you’ve got NetFlix, you might have one or two other connected devices, it’s
very easy for a home of four people to have up to 15 devices connected to the Internet
at any time.
That’s a lot of traffic for your router to be supporting, 15 devices wirelessly, and
most of our older routers are on the 2.4 Ghz network which also has things like mobile
phones, not cellular phones, wireless phones that you might have.
Those sorts of things live on that network as well.
So traffic congestion on the network itself might be an issue, especially with an older
router.
Now you can upgrade to a newer router that goes into the 5 GHz space.
That’s what I’ve just done.
I’ve just actually installed this router.
I’m giggling.
It’s a mean-looking router.
It’s a tri-band and it sort of runs one 2.4 GHz and two 5 GHz channels so I am having
a lot of fun kind of figuring out a strategy for using this within our home.
Trust me, NetFlix issues are going to be a thing of the past as far as my home is concerned
once I have all my different pieces in place.
So now I’ve got this router running but I’ve also got my old Apple AirPort Extreme,
which is a 2.4 GHz router.
So let’s take a look at how we can figure out where traffic congestion comes from because
within each band, we have different channels that we can choose.
Most routers are configured to automatically choose what it considers to be the best but
I’m not sure they do a good job all the time so here I. what we might consider doing
as far as figuring out exactly which channel is best.
Now I’ve installed a simple app on my smartphone here.
It’s called WiFi Analyzer.
Now this is on an Android phone.
There are similar products on iPhones and there are also similar products that you can
get and just download for your desktop computers as well, be it Mac or Windows.
They will all kind of sniff out your networks and give you some feedback.
So here’s the WiFi Analyzer and it’s telling me what’s happening on each of my different
networks here that I’ve got running, that I have access to in my home.
So here what I’ve got right now is a channel graph showing the traffic on those channels.
But the two most useful tools here is this one here, which is actually a signal meter
which will allow you to choose your different routers and then choose what the signal strength
is for each of those routers.
Now you can see this one here even though this router is actually in my office with
me, it’s coming at this and it’s got a fairly strong signal.
But my other router is sitting right next to me as well and look at the difference.
I’ll even go on the same 2.4 GHz and let’s see what happens.
It pings right up so it’s obviously more powerful signal.
A more powerful signal is coming from that router.
So as you’re evaluating different locations in your home, using this meter you can kind
of walk around your house and see where signal strength is strong and weak.
Now if you need a repeater, plugging a repeater in where the signal is weak to reach the weak
area is your best bet for making sure there are no dead spots in your home.
Occasionally however with dead spots, you are going to find a spot that even a repeater
doesn’t reach.
I had a friend who I was helping out this past summer, they’ve got like a concrete
bunker in their basement where they have their television and they couldn’t get NetFlix
in there.
They couldn’t get an internet signal in there even with a repeater right outside the
room.
So what we did then is we used the powerline kits.
All of the major router manufactures have powerline kits where you plug basically the
router right into the wall socket and it uses the wiring within your home to reach whatever
room it is you want to reach.
That was the way we got a strong signal into their media room, which was this concrete
bunker that no WiFi signal seemed to reach.
So there are ways to even reach the hardest-to-reach areas in your home if you choose to.
So back to the 2.4 GHz story though, I was talking about congestion just a few moments
and then I got way off track.
The tool that I like in this WiFi Analyzer is the channel rating tool because this one
here will allow me to select my router.
I’ve got my old AirPort Extreme here but here we see, channel 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7—those
are fairly congested.
There’s a lot of traffic on those.
Now part of that’s probably coming from interference from neighbors, routers that
are travelling on the same network so those are all fairly, fairly busy.
But you can see here at the very top of this scale, 13, 14 and even channel 9, they’re
performing an awful lot better and it’s recommending channel 11 right now as the best
channel to use.
So if you do find that you have congestion on the lower channels, even though the router
is set to automatically broadcast and to choose the best one, all you have to do is you have
to go into your router settings.
Now this might seem a little geekish on the surface but it’s not as bad as you think.
I’ve got the Control Panel from the new NetGear Genie, which I’m not going to show
you this feature because it’s easy to find here but on the Apple Airport Utility, I’ll
show you what happens.
You basically log into your router and you go in and you edit it.
When you go to edit your router, you’re going to find within it all of these tools,
something that’s relating to wireless.
Now when you go into wireless option, you’ll find the radio channel that it’s using.
You can see here that it’s set to automatic.
I can just choose a different channel here and force the signal onto that channel, onto
the least busy channel.
That way I can avoid the congestion, avoid the traffic and hopefully improve performance
through my whole network.
Now when you’ve got multiple bands as I do with the NetGear Genie, then it becomes
even easier for me to create low congestion channels for me to have my different services
I’m running on.
So why am I excited about having three channels or three bands?
Well, because I’m going to keep NetFlix and the family’s entertainment stuff on
one of the bands.
I’m going to put all of my business connections on another band and then I’m going to put
everybody else and have kind of catch-all on a third band.
As a matter of fact, what I’m probably going to do is I’m actually going to hide the
SSID, hide the network name of business band so that it’s always just protected just
for when I’m doing work things, which is the most crucial as far as I’m’ concerned.
It might not be what the rest of the family is concerned with but it is certainly what
Steve is concerned with.
I’m going to set that up here as well.
By the way, while I’m on the topic of SSID, that’ the name that you see when you go
and you search for WiFi networks.
You can actually make it a hidden name if you want to.
As long as you know the name, you can still log onto the network.
What’s the best name that you’ve found that people posted for SSIDs?
When I first moved into this house, a person here had “It hurts when I pee,” which
I thought was hilarious.
But the best one of all was I could tell that somebody was helping their elderly parents
with their WiFi parents and it was, “Log on to this one, dad.”
It was the name of my absolute favorite of all of the network SSIDs.
So you can do a little political commentary and that sort of stuff and add humor as well
when you set up your router.
So that pretty much takes care of almost everything I can think of as far as improving WiFi performance
in your house.
To summarize: Make sure your router is high and centrally located.
If you do have dead spots, use a repeater in order to try and reach those dead spots.
If there’s still a problem area, consider using powerline converter kits to get through
the walls into those real problem areas.
Reduce the amount of congestion on your WiFi network by selecting the least used channels
by using one of the little WiFi sniffer tools to figure out which channels are being used
the least on your network.
And finally, be a little bit patient.
Sometimes, it’s just the broadband connection to the internet that is acting slow.
And if your family is still complaining, staring at you and saying, “What’s wrong with
the WiFi?”
and you really don’t know what to do, that gives you an excuse to go out and get one
of these routers, which if it doesn’t solve every problem in your life, at least it will
solve the issue of people staring at you and saying, “What’s wrong with the WiFi, Steve?”
I hope you found this video today to be useful.
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Until next time, I’m Steve Dotto.
Have fun storming the castle.