6 Tips to Speed Up Your Company’s WiFi

February 20th, 2019
6 Tips to Speed Up Your Company’s WiFi

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A slow or unreliable WiFi connection is an easy thing to fix, and will improve employee productivity and decrease frustration in the office. In fact, 42 percent of employees reported that a fast WiFi connection is a major contributing factor to greater workplace productivity.

Before upgrading your wireless router, check out our tips below for simple connectivity fixes.

Analyze Your Router’s Position

Just because you no longer need an ethernet cable to connect to the Internet, doesn’t mean you are totally free to connect wherever, whenever. Remember that your WiFi router sends out signals that need to be detectable by your devices. Ensuring that the router is in the center of the building and in an open space without too many walls is an easy way to improve signal responsiveness. If you have your router butted up in the corner of a room with cement walls, you’re not making it very easy for the WiFi signals to reach other areas of the building. You should also keep in mind that storing your router next to other technology will interfere with the signal.

Boost Your Signal

Most offices weren’t designed for optimal WiFi usage. If you find this is the case with your space and see no improvement after playing around with the position of your router, you may need a WiFi booster. These devices strengthen the signals transmitted from your router and help them reach further in your building.

You can also try changing the channel on your WiFi router and network. Chances are, many other companies around you use WiFi, and these networks can interfere with each other. You should be able to search through the channels to find one that isn’t being used in your area, which will improve the speed of your network.

Secure Your Signal

Leaving your WiFi network open to the public not only puts you at risk for data theft, it also eats up your bandwidth. Even if your network is password protected, you should ensure the password is regularly updated with a strong password. Until your password is updated, anyone you have given WiFi access to – previous employees or visitors – can still access your network.

Delete Your Cache

The cache on your devices saves data from previous sessions so it is faster the next time you load it up. However, over time, the list can grow excessively long and bog down your connection. Try manually clearing the cache on your device to increase your connection speed, and free up space on your device.

Conserve Bandwidth

Unfortunately, we only have so much access to data at any given time so it is important to figure out what is using significant bandwidth on your network. Typically, applications that use video are the biggest bandwidth hogs – especially high definition video. An easy fix for this is to try and schedule use of these applications when WiFi is in lower demand – such as during lunch break.

Setup a Guest Network

Setting up a Guest Network not only protects your network, but it also improves speed. Most modern access points allow you to create multiple SSID’s (WiFi networks), so you can create one for your guests.

The goal is to separate the guest network traffic from your own network. To do so, create a separate Virtual Local Area Network (vLAN) for your guest network. When creating a vLAN, first you need to create the vLAN on the router first, and then assign the vLAN to the guest SSID in the access point. This allows you to bypass the firewall so it doesn’t slow the Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) on your firewall.

Still not happy with your connectivity? Contact us today, we’re here to help!