THERE ARE LOADS of ways to get a faster wireless network connection. You can knock down walls in your house so the signal can travel more efficiently. You can chuck your current network hardware and buy a whole new set. Or you could go down the easier, free route of making sure your network is operating on the right channel and tweaking its settings for maximum speed. It’s like tuning a radio to a different station.
There’s a simple reason you might need to change your network channel. When there are many other wireless networks in your local area, signals can clash, causing interference that makes network traffic slow down. There are several possible channels a wireless network can operate on. We’re going to look at the traffic in your area and move your network to the least - clogged channel, ensuring you’ll get the best results.
1. GET STARTED To analyze your local network traffic in greater depth, we’re going to use a tool called inSSIDer. It’s a full, open-source network analyzer capable of some incredibly complex things, but we’re really only going to skim the surface of its abilities. Download the inSSIDer installer and run it just click Next repeatedly to get it installed.
Run inSSIDer — you’ll find it inside a folder called Metageek in your Start menu. Click the tab marked “2.4GHz channels,” then look at the top of the screen for a button labeled Start. This sets inSSIDer hunting around your local area for networks. It’ll likely find many more than Windows would normally bring up (image A). Make sure you click Stop when you’re done.
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| (image A) |
2. CHANGE THE CHANNEL Look at the graph the program presents you (image B). This is a map of where the networks in your area fall along the 11 main wireless channels, their height representing their signal strength from your current location. It’s up to you to interpret your own graph, since it won’t be the same as ours. Find an area with some empty space, or find a quiet channel, and write down its number.
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| (image B) |
The channel you’ve picked out will be your network’s new home. If it’s nice and clear, you should get a decent boost in speed out of it. But to change the channel on your wireless router, you’re going to need to log in to its admin interface, and that’s different for every router. We’ll show you the steps we took on our Asus WL-700ge — you may need to search the Internet for specifics about your own model.
Start by firing up a web browser — any will do — and go to the local IP address of the wireless router, in this case 192.168.1.1. This brings up the login screen of the router, where you’ll need to enter your login credentials. If you don’t know yours, it’s likely they’re still at their defaults, so dig out the manual or search on the Internet and you should be able to gain access (image C).
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| (image C) |
From here you need to access the Advanced Setting screen, as the basic wireless settings don’t offer the option to change the channel. It’s rather simple on this router to change the channel — there’s a drop-down box in the middle of the screen that lets us do it (image D). Again, your router will have a different settings menu, but the process should be quite similar. While we’re poking around, we can also look for a number of other settings that will keep the router speedy.
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| (image D) |
3. MAKE FURTHER CHANGES You’re also given the option of setting a wireless mode, in this case choosing to turn off the older 802.11b service (image E). If you still have devices that use it, you’ll want to leave it switched on, but if you only have modern 802.11g devices in your house, you can safely switch the mode and claw back the tiniest fraction of a speed boost. Then it’s time to head to the advanced wireless page.
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| (image E) |
Here you can fiddle with all sorts of things, but we’ll stick to the bits we know are going to help wireless speed. Turning up the radio power should provide better signal at a distance, so we’ll do that. Turning on the “afterburner” mode is only useful if you have wireless cards or dongles in your computers that support it, so we’ll leave it off. And frame burst, lower down the page, is a must.
After you’ve made the changes, you’ll need to apply them and save your settings. Your router will probably reboot at this point (image F). Once everything has come back online, run inSSIDer again to check the results of your changes and ensure that your wireless connection has moved from its original channel to its new home. Try a download — you should see the benefits immediately.
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| (image F) |
So you’ve checked out the wireless channels in your area, found the ideal one for your network, and hopefully — depending on your router — switched its channel to some empty space. If it seems to have made things worse, there may be some other interference — a cordless phone, for example — in your new channel, so try a few until you find the best one.
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