With internet connectivity growing more important to our lives every day, it can be helpful to understand the key factors that can affect the speed and stability of your connection. This short guide will attempt to help out.
Signal strength is one of the most obvious aspects of wifi, since devices will show you how your signal is based on the number of bars. A stronger signal will obviously perform better on average, but with modern wifi technology, anything other than an incredibly weak signal should provide a generally usable wifi connection. Where weaker signals can be most problematic is in affecting the stability of the connection, as weaker signals will be far more susceptible to sources of interference which can create short disruptions. These disruptions may go unnoticed when streaming Netflix due to it preloading video, but can be highly impactful to those working from home, as many remote work applications demand stability. The best option for improving your wifi coverage is
Wifi versioning just might be the most confusing aspect of wifi. N600, AC1900, Wifi 5, Wifi 6; what does it all mean? There is a lot of technical complexity that goes into these standards, so let’s focus on practical takeaways. Wifi 5 and 6 are the newest distinctions and are designed to simplify the process, with simple version numbers increasing as meaningful advances are reached. Wifi 5 and Wifi 6 are both perfectly adequate for home wifi for the near future. The most straightforward way to evaluate older techs (N300, N600, AC1200, AC1900, etc.) is to ignore the lettering and just look at the number. The number technically denotes speed, but those ratings are theoretical. The simple takeaway here is that a number of 600 or higher is good, and 1200 or higher is ideal.