How To Improve Wi-Fi Connections

Wireless fidelity  is my preferred connection for home internet. The reason is it's flexibility, simplicity and portability. Another reason is almost all new addition of  internet capable devices  are already wi-fi enabled, which is a good news. This means freedom from wires and you can internet power your devices anywhere around the house for as far as your router wi-fi  signal can beam it's signal.

But there is also a bad news, especially when you are near to a neighbour who has a wi-fi router transmitting signal with the same channel as your router is transmitting. Why is it a bad news?

Have you experienced a drop in your network's throughput? Or a significant delay in loading web pages or files which are not that of much data? Or session disruptions like no internet connections from your ISP but your friend's internet with the same ISP company has no problem with the service?

Chances are the channel your router is broadcasting it's signal is at the same channel with that of your neighbour's, which is making a bottleneck or overlapping signals that can cause disruptions like disconnections, no internet access, not able to maintain connection.

So how would you know which channel is your router's signal is broadcasting compared to your neighbour's?

For this task, you need to download a free program, inSSIDer wi-fi scanner, that can tell the channel of the router's signal around you. Download and install this application from

http://www.metageek.net/products/inssider/download/

Then open up the application and you will see the nearby routers and which channel they are broadcasting. Interestingly, most of my neighbours, broadcast to channel 3 just like mine!

If the results is like the screen shot above and you have a problem with your connection, then it is worth a try to change the channel of your wi-fi signal broadcast.

Go to your router's default gateway, for belkin it is http://192.168.0.1 . If not sure, click start and at the search window type cmd, then press enter, then at the command prompt type in ipconfig, then press enter. The resulting number under default getway is your router's address. Open a browser and type in http:// plus the default getway number to get inside your router's configuration.

Then log in with your router's log in credentials (for netgear, the default user name is admin and password is password) and change the channel under wireless settings. This time I have choosen channel 11.

Going back to inSSIDer application, here is the result. You can clearly see the overlap of Hollow1 and Hollowfield5 at channel 3 and a lot of wi-fi's at channel 1, and my router alone at channel 11.

You need to re connect and type in the security key to all your wi-fi devices after change of channel. You may need to forget or delete the wireless access and re discover it again on other devices that can not reconnect to internet  after change of channel.