router

Router

Placement Location: A wireless router (from here on in this post, it will be addressed as "router" for short) broadcasts Wi-Fi signals away from it in all directions. Think of the signal coverage as a globe with the router being right in the centre. Outside of this globe, clients will not get a signal. This globe, however, is not exactly spherical; one of the reasons is because the signals are generally turned to go out more horizontally than vertically, and like all radio signals, they tend to spread laterally and downward the farther they are from the broadcaster. That said the best place to place your wireless router or access point is in the centre of your home and elevated.

To take advantage of this, use the telephone jack (or coax cable outlet) at or near the centre of the house, preferably on the upper floor when applicable, to connect to your modem and then your router. If need be, hire an electrician to create a new outlet in the right place. If it is not possible to move the phone jack or run coax cable to where you want, use a long network cable to connect the router to the modem, leaving the modem where the jack is and the router/access point at the centre of the house. (In my experience, it is actually quite easy to run cables above the ceiling, or under the house).

Surroundings: A wireless signal works best outdoors in an open environment. Since it's not possible to have that indoors, you can improve the signal a great deal by making sure the immediate surroundings of the router/modem are clear, especially in the directions you want the signals to reach. This means you do not want to leave the router in a closet, or put it between a big TV and a wall. The best place to leave the router is in midair, but since that is quite hard to do, the second best thing is to put it on the surface of a desk, or mount it on the wall when applicable. Generally, all physical objects, such as walls, glass doors, and so on, weaken Wi-Fi signals, some more than others.

Antenna positioning: With a router that comes with external antennas, you can slightly tweak the above-mentioned globe of coverage. Generally you want the antennas to stay vertical if you want the signal to go wide (which is the most popular usage). If want the signal to go deep into the basement and up to the top floor, set the antennas to stay horizontal. Note that this only works relatively, and with some routers, you might not experience any difference at all whichever way you set its antennas. If the antennas are detachable, it is likely that you can replace them with high-gain antennas (most of the time this means bigger ones), which noticeably helps increase coverage. (You might also be able to increase the power of the antennas, hence the range, by attaching to it a piece of aluminium foil curled up into a parabolic shape.)

For routers with an internal antenna design, there is nothing you can do. Modern routers, especially N750, N900, and 802.11ac routers, however, generally come with very powerful and smart antennas that essentially increase their power toward the direction of connected clients automatically, using a technology called beamforming.

2. Equipment Now that you have placed your router properly and still do not find enough improvement, it is time to check the equipment. Get ready to spend some money.

Router: Ideally you just want to have one wireless broadcaster at home and for most homes, a single router is good enough. That said, if you have a small house and the router (put in the middle) cannot cover every corner, it is time to consider replacing it.

Access point: A separate access point is an ideal solution for a large and sprawling home, one that you can't put the router in the centre, or one with a deep basement, with an existing router. Basically, you want to put the second access point at the location where the signal of the existing router cannot reach or gets really weak. A typical example of this setup is where you have the main router in the living room and the second access point in the basement.

Now the trick is to connect the access point to the router. Ideally, you want to run a network cable from the router to the access point (you want to connect the access point's LAN port to one of the router's LAN ports). If this is too much of a job, you can resort to power-line networking.

Many routers can also work as an access point and will indicate this in its list of features. In this case the router's WAN port will work as a LAN port. In fact, for the secondary access point scenario, it is best to use two identical routers, one as the main, and the second as an access point for the far side of the house. This way you do not have to learn about two different devices.

.