Even before we were all working from home and spending more and more time at home in general, we all wanted fast wifi to stream shows, play games, etc. After 2020, optimizing your home wifi network is more popular than ever, as we look to support the all of our connected devices. The avergage US household had 10 connected devices in 2020 and its easy to predict that number will only increase in 2021 and the years ahead.
Getting the most from your home wifi
There are two key steps to optimizing your home internet/wifi connectivity.
1 – Selecting your internet/broadband provider and service speed
It all starts with selecting your broadband provider and deciding on the service level (speed) that best suits your needs. Available speeds still vary greatly throughout the US by internet provider and region. So, step one is just determining what is available in your area and then the cost for the different options. If you find yourself at or above that 10 connected devices average in your household and you stream a lot of content or regularly use a lot of bandwidth for video conferences while working from home or your kids taking virtual classes, then you will want to look for higher speed broadband. But, if your needs are less significant, you might get by with slower speeds. It all depends.
2 – Maximizing the wifi signal and coverage in your house
Once you have your internet provider set up, there is another key step and that is enabling your wifi network. The days of wiring all of our devices (computers, etc.) into our router are long gone. Most devices don’t even really provide that option, so having wifi set up in your home is a must. But, here you have some options. Many routers you get from your internet provider will also include wifi capability. Depending on the size of your home, the router’s built-in wifi setup may be more than adequate. However, you want to consider 2 things.
Does your router provide a signal that covers your entire home, or at least everywhere you would need to have wifi access? The best way to test this is simple to walk around your house with your mobile phone and check your internet connectivity. Do you get a signal everywhere you need one? If so, great! If not, you still have some options.
Then, how fast is the internet access from your wifi signal compared to the speed of the wired modem? Run a speed test on your mobile phone from various points in your home. Compare the results to the internet speed your are paying for in your account. It’s not at all uncommon to lose some of the speed from your hard wired connection, once it goes over wifi, but if the dropoff is significant, then you may want to consider some other options.
In our house, we had the problem that despite paying for very high-speed broadband, the wifi signal from the router we received from our internet provider wasn’t strong enough to reach everywhere in our house. So, we went the route of purchasing a more powerful wifi modem and connecting it to our router. Years ago, we bought the Eero Pro and set up a mesh network throughout our house. It worked really well, but as internet speeds increased we discovered that our system was no longer capable of actually handling the speed that we were paying for. So we recently upgraded to the Eero Pro 6, which turned out to be a very easy switch out with our current Eero system and didn’t require setting up a new network name or login.
