Optimize Your WiFi

There are a lot of settings in the modern wireless router that most people just ignore. I've mentioned MAC address filtering in a prior article, and today I'd like to discuss the channel setting.

You can think about the channel setting on your router much like a channel setting on an old analog television set or radio. In WiFi you have channels (ranging from 1 to 11), and just like when you are driving a long distance and you get an overlap when you are in between radio stations, if your WiFi is on a channel that is the same or close to a nearby hotspot or router, you will get the same interference that a radio will, receiving two stations at once or switching back and forth between the two. This can affect your bandwidth and connectivity.

So how do you know what channel is best for your WiFi network? Generally you can assume that if there are other wireless networks nearby that you'll need to change this from the default setting. One way to find out what channel is best is to use a free product like NetStumbler (for PC) or iStumbler (for the Mac). Running these will show you the nearby networks and what channels they are on. You will want to choose a channel as far away from the ones that show up on the stumbler as possible, so if you see a lot of folks on channel 6, setting yours to 1 or 11 is a good bet. If there are a lot of people on channels 1 and 2, then go to channel 11.

By setting your WiFi to the right channel you can dramatically improve your network reliability and often times this will resolve "mystery" issues with your wireless network.