Have you wondered why your WiFi connection seems a little slow? Sluggish? Like downloading your web pages through treacle?
The problem isn’t that your WiFi Router or Access-Point is old, slow or just broken – the problem is most likely that you have ‘WiFi crowding’.
Crowding? How can a Wifi get “crowded”?
Well the answer is simple – almost all Wifi devices want to default to the same wireless “channel” – and the more devices in the same space, the slower your device gets – because it has to sort out your signal from the other signals.
So how do you tell if your WiFi is crowded?
First, grab a WiFi analysis tool – I used InSSIDer Home – which is not a free tool, but a free alternative is Acrylic WiFi, and you’ll use it to look at the WiFi signals around you:
InSSIDer Home – Free Tool
Get Acrylic WiFi for free here
Using this tool, you can look at the signals and I’m fairly certain you’ll find a large number of access points and routers crowded around channel 6.
Once you’ve seen how much competition your router/access point has, you can perhaps imagine that the router is needing to sort your signal out from half a dozen or more signals – every time another was added, your router got a little slower. In my neighborhood, I found almost 20 devices using the same default wifi channel – ie, channel 6.
It was pretty clear that I needed to move to another channel!
So – on my access point, I logged in, and went to the WiFi settings:
So – to change channel – first turn off the “Auto channel selection” – because that’s what decided to select the default channel of 6 – and that’s SLOW… auto-channel selection sucks, it never seems to optimize anything – just sit on the default.
Now, choose a different channel that is less crowded – in my case, I decided to choose channel 8 – and my WiFi was much, much, MUCH faster.