Why Is My WiFi So Slow?

One of the most popular questions that comes forth when talking to customers is regarding their WiFi and why it drops connection or seems incredibly slow at times. This, among several other similar questions about speed, can be due to numerous factors and cannot be a cut and dry response.

WiFi connectivity at home can be a life saver and, even more so now, is absolutely essential to have in our daily lives. However, when not setup properly, it can become quite the hinderance and a frustrating thorn in our side. Since many home WiFi routers are plug and play to ease installation for many, without the proper know-how of fine tuning and configuring essential elements which are unique to the environment it is running in, problems of rebooting, dropping signal and weak performance are almost guaranteed.

Here in our local community and in much of the surrounding areas, we are on Rural Speed Internet, with speeds, at their best, at around 120 mb/s. Many are on 25 mb/s max plans. However, this is more than enough for the average family's Internet use.

For many, when they get their router installed by their service provider or in doing it themselves, it's done so using the quick setup method - Plug in, set a network name and password and connect. Many do not go far beyond this. This will work well initially but not for very long. Sadly, technicians and average home users do not look at proper signal surroundings, proper router placement factors, amount of users and/or devices connecting and several other key factors required for proper setup. So, I am going to give you a few essential tips to ensure your WiFi is more secure and robust in your home. Unfortunately, I can't do anything about the speed of your Internet 😉

1. Proper router placement. Ideally, you want to place your router in the highest area of your home and in the most unobstructed area. You do not want to place it up against a wall, next to other electrical devices (like TV's or monitors), in cabinets, near or against windows/glass, and never near a microwave as they seriously interfere with 2.4 GHz signals.
2. WiFi Surrounding Signals. After you have named your network and created a password (we will come back to the password) you want to use an app on your phone or laptop that can see the surrounding WiFi signals in your immediate area broadcasting from your neighbours or local business' WiFi routers. There are many great free tools out there but I like Analiti or WiFi Analyzer for the average user. You can get them on the App store of your choice. Your router may even have this tool built in so check to see if it has a WiFi Analysis link in the settings. Fire up one of these tools and look at the surrounding network channels in use. Many show this graphically or in list view. In your WiFi settings of your router, change the WiFi channel to a numeric value as far away as you can from any channels you see in use. Crossover traffic can greatly affect the quality of your network and also makes it less secure.
3. Limit Your Power and Speed. This may throw you off but... stay with me! Unfortunately, as many people use the "Plug and Play" method of setup, neigbouring WiFi is blasting out and taking up many available channels. In doing so, this method hogs much of the available WiFi channels and leaves none for the neighbours, which will now cause crosstalk and much congestion. One of the great features of WiFi routers is their ability to provide blazing speed by binding the use of many channels together. And keep in mind, this is speed from your WiFi Router to your device. It has nothing to do with Internet speed. For the average user, nobody needs that kind of speed and keep in mind, your internet will only travel at the speed you purchased..it doesn't matter how incredibly fast your WiFi is. Additionally, speed doesn't mean better performance. Performance and quality usually suffer. So, in your router settings change your bandwidth use to 20 or 40 MHZ at most, in a congested area. This will strengthen your signal quality and performance and slightly lessen the signal distance. If you are finding that the signal is too weak in further areas of your property, then add an extender or mesh devices to rebroadcast your signal out further without interfering with your neighbours.
4. Secure Your Connections. Security, security, security. You hear it all the time and yes, it is important. Following the industry standards of password creation is a must! Never use the same password for anything and ensure you use the 8 character minimum (we recommend a minimum of 14), and ensure you use upper and lowercase, numbers, and special characters/symbols ( ! $# + ~ are some great examples). Also, try and keep clear of a common word. Random characters or random words together work better. for example, "My@HomeWiFi99" is less secure than "hoMe-mY@Wi99Fi". Jumbled and change of case, definitely helps and gives far greater peace-of-mind. Also ensure to change to the default router login password to something different.
5. Disable & Change. Lastly, we always like to recommend some key changes of disabling and adjusting a few features but, some of these tend to be a bit more on the advanced side. Definitely disable UPNP (usually in the Admin Settings or Advanced), disable WPS (1button push to join WiFi, disable "Respond to PING from WAN" (that's a biggie!), limit your DHCP scope (home users do not need 255 available addresses), changing your Gateway address (default is 192.168.0.1 or 192.168.1.1. Industry standard is to create numbered scopes for types of network equipment, by locations and types of devices) and change the default DNS server to one that is more secure and private (Cloudfare, Quad 9, CleanBrowser or Control D to name a few).

Yup, I probably lost some of you on those last few changes but, that's okay, don't worry, its not mandatory to do all of those changes. Just following the first 4 steps can make a world of difference to connectivity and to your security. However, once you get more comfortable with router settings, you may want to beef up your security by making some of those latter changes. It helps being familiar with the basic functionality of the devices your sensitive data is travelling through. Making these simple changes will be providing you complete peace-of-mind in knowing your data and browsing activity is secure and your connectivity is top-notch!