Top 5 Mistakes People Make When Blaming Wi-Fi

 

[UPDATED 2021-12-07]
[originally posted 2018-04-28]

When connecting to Wi-Fi, people will sometimes experience slow or bad connections. That's not to say that the actual Wi-Fi is bad, but there are many other things to consider. This is my list for the top 5 mistakes that people always make when blaming Wi-Fi.


#5. Too many people using one hotspot.

     A Wi-Fi router or Access Point is a true bottleneck. Multiple users will be using the same hotspot. Take a look around and if there are more than 5 people using Wi-Fi, then chances are the connection speeds are going to be limited. These days, each person can have 4 or more Wi-Fi devices on their person at any given time. This includes all IoT (Internet of Things devices), smartphones, tablets, laptops, cameras, and video game systems. Divide a single Wi-Fi connection by the number of users, times the number of devices they are currently using and the shared bandwidth speed of the internet connection speed keeps getting smaller and smaller. In other words, the size of the slice of the Wi-Fi pie shrinks for every device connected. The optimal number of devices on one AP/router should be kept at 15 or less.



#4. Distance.

     People often connect to the Wi-Fi but they don't even try to look at where the router or access point is. The farther away you are from it, the worse the connection will be. Let's say you walk into a building whether it be an office, or shop or a restaurant of some kind, and you connect to the free Wi-Fi but you are only getting 2 out of 5 bars of signal strength. You automatically say, wow this connection sucks. But did you ever take into account where the Wi-Fi is coming from? Can you see the actual access point?


#3. Noise A.K.A Co-channel Interference.

     I'm not acutally talking about audible sounds type of noise. Noise in Wi-Fi terms is talking about co-channel interference from other radio frequency devices. Co-channel interference and noise most often comes from other Wi-Fi devices. So you're connected to a specific Wi-Fi network SSID but, when you were connecting to it, did you see the list of all the other Wi-Fi SSID network names in that list? Those ones are most likely interfering with your current connection. How about your neighbor next to you. Are they using their phone to create a tethered Wi-Fi hotspot for their other devices? Any other Wi-Fi network SSID name, other than the one you are trying to connect to is called a Rogue network, and can potentially cause noise and interference.



#2. Battery Life.

     How low is the battery on your device? If you are using a mobile device, like a smartphone or tablet or something compact, it usually means, the device is likely optimized for lower voltage to extend battery life and also that their Wi-Fi antenna won't be very strong to begin with. What that also means is that there is far less electricity to power the Wi-Fi antenna. As the battery drains past 50% or more, most devices will go into a power saving mode that will likely decrease electrical power and may also reduce the effectiveness of it's Wi-Fi. Some devices will turn off Wi-Fi entirely at a certain point.
 


#1. The age and Wi-Fi standard on their device. (802.11a/b/g/n/ac/ax ?)

     Is your device dual-band capable and is it using the latest standard? If your device is less than 4 years old, then the answer is most likely yes. The 5.0 Ghz band on 802.11ac and higher, is the optimal way to use Wi-Fi as it will experience far less noise interference, and has a much higher connection speed. If the device can only use 802.11n or lower, then those connections will be much poorer and susceptible to interference almost always, and will have a much lower connection speed.



Conclusion.

People can be very quick to determine that the Wi-Fi sucks, but in reality it actually doesn't suck at all. All five of the things mentioned above need to be taken into account when troubleshooting. The Wi-Fi router/Access Point could be the absolutely newest, fastest-speed one on the market, and people will still blame it for bad connections, rather than taking a minute to assess their own device and how it connects.

There are also other things to consider, such as the layers past the Wi-Fi router/AP, like "how fast is the actual internet connection?", and "are there any problems on the rest of the wired network?"