10 Tips for Improving Your Wireless Network

Ten tips for improving your wireless network was a popular post on Digg recently, so popular in fact it hit the front page on three different occasions, another reason Digg is so painful. Anyway, it was a Microsoft contribution and the top ten tips can be summarized as follows, although most of them have a high “Durrh!” factor, others could turn out to be quite useful, if you’re struggling to get a good connection with your wireless router.

• Position your wireless router (or wireless access point) in a central location
• Move the router off the floor and away from walls and metal objects (such as file cabinets)
• Replace your router’s antenna (with a high-gain antenna)
• Replace your computer’s wireless network adapter (with a USB adapter having an external antenna)
• Add a wireless repeater (to boost the signal to remote parts of your mansion or offices
• Change your wireless channel
• Reduce wireless interference (avoid interfering cordless phones and other devices)
• Update your firmware or your network adapter driver (you never know there might be upgrades)
• Pick equipment from a single vendor (for the sake of compatibility)
• Replace devices with the latest version wireless-b to wireless-g and beyond (costly)

Item 6 is the one that caught my eye, but it’s very difficult to tell exactly what signal strength you’re getting on each channel given the kludgy monitoring software that comes with most wireless kit or a Google or Yahoo widget for instance. Bad, Good, Excellent are the usual gradations with such software. Thankfully, a head-up from PC World online, highlighted a more precise tool Net Stumbler. This basically converts your wireless machine into a signal analysis device that can help you find the right channel and exactly which wing of your mansion will give you the optimum signal strength. So, give the top ten tips a try, run Net Stumbler before and after and see if you can still connect to the net while lunching in the West wing.