How to Improve Signal Strength on a Wireless Network

Video Transcript

"In this clip we're going to show you how to improve the signal of a wireless Internet connection. I'm not employed by or affiliated with any of the websites or products demonstrated today. Okay, there's some things that we want to look at in terms of speeding up our wireless connection. First of all, let's take a look at modem placement. You see here that the modem's placed away from the wall and above the floor. Those are two important things to consider. Don't, some people try to put it under their desk and that'll cause the wireless connection to not function as quickly as it possibly could. The other thing we can look at is the fact that this is a two story house we're demonstrating in, and in this case the router and the modem are upstairs because the signal travels better to the downstairs and has a problem travel vertically, so if I'd set this up in the downstairs office we wouldn't get as good a signal up here as vice a versa. Additionally, in looking at the modem, these are omni-directional antennas. And another thing you can do is you can go to a computer store and order omni-directional antennas. In this case, the other computer we're shooting at is in this direction. You put an omni-directional antenna on here, point in that direction and all your signal strength is headed where you need it. So that would also potentially speed up that interface between the computer and the router. Another step in speeding up your Internet connection would be to update your firmware and to periodically check and make sure that any new updates are added to the router to maximize its speed. Here, we've gone to Linksys site, which is the router that we have today that we're working with, and we're going to go down to 'select category' and again, it's a wireless router, and now that we've selected the model, we're going to look at the bottom of our router and determine that in our case, we have version four, which is a dated firmware. So Linksys is advises that if we'd like to upgrade to the newest firmware, we should click the firmware tab here, and when you do that, what's going to happen is it's going to download the program for you and in the setup there, there will be instructions for most of the routers, telling you how to proceed. And that's how you can improve the signal strength of a wireless network."