TURBO BOOST YOUR WI- FI COVERAGE FOR FREE

Bedevilled by flaky wireless? Nik Rawlinson explains how to get a boost using free apps, technical tweaks and equipment you already own

Wi-Fi is part of the fabric of our homes. We use it for staying in touch, streaming TV, playing games, controlling smart devices and more. It’s such a vital part of modern life that, in 2016, the UN formally recognised internet access as a human right. When your connection slows to a crawl, or keeps inexplicably dropping out, that’s a problem.

Fortunately, fixing it needn’t be expensive. If the problem is range, there are plenty of low-cost solutions, such as wireless repeaters and powerline extenders, that can help you get a faster or stronger signal in remote locations around your home.

And you may be able to dramatically improve your Wi-Fi performance without spending any money at all, by following the simple steps below. We can’t promise that you’ll enjoy superfast coverage throughout your home, especially if it has dense insulation or thick stone walls – but at least you’ll know you’re

getting the best out of your existing kit before you get to the point of splashing out on additional hardware.

Survey your surroundings

If your coverage is patchy, the first step is to find out the lie of the land. That means working out a map of the hotspots and “notspots” in your home, so you know which areas to focus on.

If that sounds like a tricky technical exercise, fear not: there are plenty of free smartphone apps that can quickly identify problem areas. Wifi Analyzer for Android ( pcpro.

link/298analyzer) is a simple tool that measures the strength of your wireless connection. To use it, you simply connect your phone to your router’s Wi-Fi signal, launch the app and walk around your house. The app shows a live read-out of the strength of your wireless connection, so you can see where the needle drops into the yellow section – or below it. Wi-Fi Sweetspots for iOS ( pcpro.

link/298sweetspots), meanwhile,

BELOW RIGHT Moving your router away from solid walls – and up from the floor – can make a big difference to reliability measures not only the strength of the radio signal, but also the functional speed of the connection. It’s normal for this to fall as you get further from the router, but you may find big, sudden drop-offs in certain locations: the graph will expose areas where the speed is falling to unacceptable levels.

Of course, what’s “unacceptable” will depend on your usage. Even if you want to stream TV shows, you can manage quite well with low bandwidth. Netflix recommends 3Mbits/sec for standard definition, 5Mbits/sec for HD and 25Mbits/sec for 4K. Amazon Prime Video requires just 900Kbits/sec for SD and 3.5Mbits/ sec for HD. Naturally, if you live in a multi-occupant household with several people using the Wi-Fi at the same time, the overall bandwidth will be shared, and your videos might drop down to a lower-quality stream.

Location, location, location

The strength, speed and range of your Wi-Fi are all hugely affected by where

you have placed your router – not just in terms of which room it’s in, but how it’s situated within that room. Phone and cable sockets are often at floor level, so it’s common to see routers sitting on the floor, but this is far from ideal. Lifting your router onto a desk – or, better, putting it on a bookshelf – will make a big difference to its range. The higher you go the better, although you will have to put up with dangling wires.

Think about direction, too. Most routers have omnidirectional antennae – indeed, many models have fully captive internal aerials that you can’t adjust even if you want to. This means that, if your router is positioned near an external wall, as much as 50% of the signal could be misdirected. Moving the router to a more central location can make a substantial difference. If you’re not worried about the aesthetics, you could even cover the wall behind the router with tin foil, to bounce “lost” signals back into your home.

If your router has external aerials, you can replace these with larger ones, with a longer reach. Or, since we’re focusing on free solutions, you may also be able to improve radio performance with a homemade antenna upgrade made from an empty soft drink can. All you have to do is remove the bottom, cut up the side to the top, then gently unbend the metal to form a curved reflector. Then slip the antenna through the ringpull opening, where it supports itself without further assistance.

It probably goes without saying that if you have any large, dense fixtures and fittings around your router, such as wardrobes or radiators, it can be very helpful to move these aside – or, perhaps easier, move the router so there’s as little furniture as possible between it and clients wanting to connect.

Slow down

The 5GHz wireless radio band is normally faster than a 2.4GHz connection, partly because it supports higher data rates. However, the higher-frequency signal is less effective at penetrating walls, floors and other objects. This is the same principle that affects regular radio broadcasts: long-wave stations can sometimes be received more than 1,000 miles from their transmission,

Lifting your router onto a desk could make a big difference