Improving The Wi-Fi In Your Home

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If you don't have Wi-Fi in your home, it's time to jump on the band wagon. With the advancements in home-technology, it is almost critical to make sure your house is set to Wi-Fi. If you're new to the whole Wi-Fi thing, give Reilly Painting a call, where we offer a technology service for your home in Cleveland.

Improve Your Wi-Fi Reception

Wi-Fi signal problems are common in homes, even when they're not that large. I previously lived in an apartment that had a router placed on one end of the room and lost most of its signal on the side—only about 100 feet away. We've previously discussed solutions to bad reception problems, but here's what I've found works best in practice:

1. Mount your router as high in the room as possible. Don't stick it under a table, in a drawer, or anywhere that can obstruct its broadcast. Keep it out in the open and as high up as possible.
2. If your router supports it, install DD-WRT (open-source custom firmware that provides additional options) and boost your transmit power a little bit. (If you don't know how, read this guide.)
3. Choose the broadcast channel with the least interference. By default, your router probably broadcasts on Channel 11. If other nearby routers are using this channel you'll end up with signal interference. To avoid this, use a tool like Wi-Fi Stumbler to discover which channels are underused. You want to pick the one that is used the least, but that also has little-to-no use on the surrounding channels. This is because your router broadcasts on a primary channel, but that broadcast bleeds into the surrounding channels as well. As a result, picking an lesser-used channel may not solve the problem if its surrounding channels are in heavy use.

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