Friday, April 27, 2012

Methods For Boosting The Range Of Your Wi-Fi Network

By Juliana B. Donatien


When you are discovering your wireless network is just not supplying the coverage you would like you might find yourself looking into a number of options available to increase your coverage in order to eliminate any black spots. Before you choose to spend any money on hardware it is always worth trying a few simple points first to obtain the most out of the wi-fi router you presently own.

I realize that the vast majority of people who find themselves reading this could quite possibly have already considered most of these helpful hints, but simply just in case you've missed some, below are a few tips that will help with improving WI-FI range:

The first and perhaps biggest thing to think of is the location of your wireless router. Carefully consider where the majority of the devices using the network are situated and try to move your wi-fi router to some location that's centralized to those devices. Don't forget that WI-FI is a lateral technology, which means it was made to transmit a signal horizontally and not vertically so if you reside in a 2-storey household, don't expect the signal to be wonderful up stairs, however sometimes you will still get away with it.

If you do need to transmit upstairs I would suggest you get yourself a powerline ethernet adaptor. This uses the current electrical wiring in your dwelling to transmit information. You merely plug one adapter right into a power outlet downstairs and the other into a power outlet upstairs. Hook up the adapter downstairs to your router by way of an ethernet cable. You'll probably already have a free power outlet next to your router so this shouldn't be a issue. After that up stairs, you will likely require another wi-fi access point to be connected to the powerline adapter. In essence it will create two wireless networks, an up stairs and a down stairs network but due to the powerline ethernet adapters they are connected to create one larger home network.

Alter the channel that the router is transmitting on. In Canada and the United States, routers use channels 6, 11, and 1. You could have interference on one of the channels so try the others to see if it improves the situation. If you are from a country apart from the USA or Canada, please be sure you check for any regulations in regard to the channel you need to operate your router on. Most routers will request you to choose your country and just offer you the channels which are permitted in your locale anyhow.

Be sure to have the newest firmware for your router. Sometimes firmware updates can dramatically increase your routers performance and reliability. This is often forgotten.

In case your router provides a easily removed antenna, perhaps consider acquiring a high gain antenna. These could be rather inexpensive and may be all you need to get the coverage you want. It's certainly worth a shot.

If all else fails there are a variety of WI-FI extenders which you could look into. They could be referred to by a number of different names for example WI-FI extender, WI-FI range booster etc. but they all effectively perform the same task.




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