Our wonderful Wi-Fi experts have decided to share some of their secrets with you today, so that you have the best Wi-Fi coverage possible in your office or place of work. It’s not often that we can coax them out and get them to reveal their magic so consider yourself lucky…
Firstly, and this may sound obvious, but you need to assess what you need from your coverage. If you underestimate the coverage needed you may find the Wi-Fi signal from your network is weak in some areas of the building. Conversely, if you over-populate the area with APs (that’s access points, such as router, to non-Geeks) your network will be at risk of cross channel interference, where the AP’s (which will likely be on the same channel of frequency), are too close and stop each other working properly.
Speaking of frequency, you ideally want to set up your AP or router to operate on the 5GHz band as the primary band, as this will give you a astonishing 8x the network capacity than if you use 2.4GHz.
Think carefully about where you place your APs. It may seem sensible to pop them in a corridor if you want to service 2 rooms on either side of said corridor, but walls will inhibit Wi-Fi performance. You could also look at removing any objects that sit directly between the AP and the devices that need to pick up the Wi-Fi signal.
Most routers come with antennae so make sure those are fixed on and move them to point where needed.
Check your office or work space for old devices that work on 802.11b Wi-Fi – they will slow your network down considerably. You can find reports and software that will identify old hardware running on 802.11b, so make sure you get rid of them all! Also look out for items that run on 2.4GHz radio frequency (i.e. Bluetooth headsets, cordless phones and baby monitors) as these will also cause interference.
Finally, the SSID (service set identifier) is a case sensitive, 32 alphanumeric identifier that client devices use to connect with a network. Try to set up your router so that it only uses one defined SSID to reduce network overheads and inrcease performance.
If all of this is rather meaningless or confusing, you can call in one of the Geekabit team (and don’t forget we have offices in Cardiff, London and Hampshire) to carry out a survey of all of the above.
A million thanks for posting this infamrotion.
A million thanks for posting this infamrotion.
A million thanks for posting this infamrotion.