Improving Wi-Fi Connectivity: From Device Selection to Setup

Many students have probably experienced this:

While watching short videos at home, suddenly the network lags during an exciting moment in a game, and the video won’t load, causing characters to fly off the map???

Lying in bed playing on your phone, you turn over and the Wi-Fi disconnects, leaving you isolated from the internet???

Slow speeds, unstable connections, and inability to connect to the internet have become common complaints in modern life.

The Wi-Fi signal is transmitted through a wireless router, and wireless signals experience different levels of attenuation depending on the medium. Signals attenuate less when passing through the air, but significantly more when penetrating walls and even more through metal cabinets. Therefore, when placing your home router, it is advisable to position it centrally in an open area, reducing the number of walls it has to penetrate and avoiding metal obstructions, such as microwaves or metal boxes.

Bandwidth refers to the 100M/200M/300M broadband plan you subscribe to. Ideally, the larger the bandwidth, the faster the internet speed. If you purchase a bandwidth of over 100M, it is recommended to use a gigabit router and gigabit cables, with at least category 6 cables. If you choose 100M cables or routers, then a 300M bandwidth will only allow a maximum speed of 100M. While it can be used normally, it cannot achieve maximum efficiency and fully utilize the 300M capability.

It is necessary to choose a dual-band router that supports both 2.4GHz and 5GHz. Typically, routers will broadcast signals at both frequencies simultaneously, but devices like phones or computers can only receive one of them. Ordinary wireless routers default to using 2.4GHz, which has better wall-penetrating capability and a larger coverage area. Therefore, neighboring routers can easily interfere with your own. Switching to the 5GHz band, which has a smaller coverage area, reduces interference from neighbors and is generally more stable.

Router antennas are generally used to transmit and receive signals. Currently, dual-band routers support transmitting signals at both 2.4GHz and 5GHz, with different transmission rates for each band, requiring different antennas for transmission. Choosing a router with multiple antennas can support higher throughput and more concurrent connections.

While having many antennas is beneficial, it does not mean that more antennas are always better. It also depends on how many antennas your phone or computer supports. If the router has 4 antennas (transmitting the 5GHz band), but your phone only supports 2 antennas (not supporting 5GHz Wi-Fi), then the final speed will only be based on the 2 antennas.

The network is like a lane; if only one or two cars are on a fixed-width lane, it might not feel crowded. But if four or five cars try to pass through at the same time, congestion occurs, and everyone’s speed decreases. Similarly, the bandwidth we subscribe to is fixed. Suppose the maximum speed at home is 1M (1024kbps); if two people are using it simultaneously, and one watches a video using 428kb, the other only has 596kb left. If a third person joins, the network will slow down even more, and devices with stronger network capabilities will unevenly distribute bandwidth.