How to improve your home's WiFi signal with your Android smartphone
WiFi
If the WiFi connection is bad due to physical obstacles or a poor router signal and you're already thinking about buying a wireless repeater, don't run.
Your Android smartphone can help you improve your WiFi connection with these easy steps.
Why is the Wi-Fi signal so low?
Many factors play against a good WiFi signal. Some of them are outside our influence, but there are others in which we can intervene:
- Location of the WiFi router.
- Thickness and material of the walls.
- Interference from other devices.
- Outdated Router (must support WiFi 802.11n standard)
Obviously the thickness and material of the walls is not something easy to modify, so the most important thing is to select a good location for the wireless router.
It should be in the center of the home, not hidden inside a drawer or closet. If the router also has antennas, these must be oriented in opposite directions to ensure a balanced distribution of the signal.
How to improve your Wi-Fi signal
After having looked for a suitable place for our router we will check the strength of the WiFi signal. To do this we will use the WiFi Analyzer application, which you can download for free from the Google Play Store:
As soon as we start the application we are going to see a graph with the different WiFi signals that we receive at that point, each one with a different color.
In the horizontal axis we will see a series of numbers from 1 to 11 that represent the channel on which each router we receive emits.
On the vertical axis, left side, we can see the signal strength in decibels-milivatios (dBm). In short, we can see the different routers, in which channel they broadcast and the intensity of each signal for the place where we are.
If we click on the eye-shaped icon we can access more information: time graph, channel score, AP list and signal meter.
Navigating between the different options we will be able to see which signals are stronger, which are more stable.
In the AP list, in addition, we will be able to access the MAC address of the devices connected to our network, a very important information in case we want to activate a filter by MAC address for greater security.
The most important information to improve our WiFi signal will be found under 'Channel Score':
- Click on the eye-shaped icon and in the small drop-down menu that appears select 'Channel Score'.
- In the upper part there is a yellow triangle on which we must click to choose our network.
- Once selected, in the upper part under the name of the network it informs us of the channel in which it emits our router and the score on 10 stars.
- Just below it advises us the best broadcasting channels and those with the least traffic.
In my example you can see how the best channel is the number 6, which gets a higher score with seven stars. We also recommend as alternatives 13 and 14, the latter is prohibited in almost all countries except Japan.
Improves Wi-Fi signal with a channel change
So far so easy. Now we only have to change the channel of our wireless router to one with which we do not have many interferences, which is what WiFi Analyzer has recommended. We must bear in mind that if we use more than one router at home they must have a minimum difference of four channels so that there is no interference between them.
The process to change the channel will depend on our router, but in most cases the process can be something like this:
- In the internet browser we enter the address http://192.168.1.1 or the address that you enter in the router instructions.
- You will be asked for an administrator password to access the router.
- In the administration panel we have to look where the Wi-Fi or WLAN network is managed.
- It changes the channel in which the wireless network is emitted to the one that has advised us WiFi Analyzer.
In the following days you can check if the WiFi signal has improved by testing in different locations, at different times and with different devices until you can optimize your WiFi signal and find a good channel in which the other signals do not bother you so much.
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