Making your Wifi faster and secure

[Demon_Skeith]

5 Simple tips on how to get your wifi set up into a better standing with your wifi needed devices: read here.

Many of them are good, but do note that hiding your SSID is not the best option. Also there is a wifi wiz in that article comment, here is some of his stuff:

1. So, the only way to get good detailed analytics on your Wireless network is to use an AP that has those capabilities built into it. Outside of using a laptop as a RF monitor with something like Xirrus WiFi inspector, you’re not going to really be able to do any sort of good analysis from the outside looking in.

I design WiFi networks for a living and there are some manufacturers out there that have some KILLER analytic suites. The one I use (Avaya WOS with 9133 access points) I can see how many concurrent stations are in use, what band they are on, what 802.11 wireless protocol they are using, what applications are being use, ingress/egress bandwidth, etc.

2.
Heres another fun tip: If your Access Point supports it, pull the transmit power as LOW as possible for the environment and disable the slowest data rates down to what you feel is acceptable. What it does is prevents stations from connecting with a -83dbm signal with a 2mb data rate and slowing everyone else down in the process. Remember, WiFi is a shared, broadcasty medium - much like a hub and your performance will go to the lowest common denominator. The more you can segregate your traffic (low speed a/b/g and high speed n/ac) the better performance you will get.

Also, having multiple radios is prime - that way you can really put the low, 2.4ghz stuff on its own radio and the high speed n/.ac stuff on its own 5ghz radio and really optimize your traffic.

3.
If you don’t want your WiFi router to be listed in Google’s/Mozilla’s/Apple’s location database (with MAC address, geolocation/coordinates and SSID) then add a suffix to your routers SSID like this: “myrouter_nomap”

This prevents your router data from being used for geolocation. Most people don’t know this or are unaware that they can do this too!

4.
Hiding your SSID is not a recommended security feature for the following reasons:

1) Finding a hidden SSID is very easy, just check inSSIDer, NetStumbler, or Kismet.
2) Hiding your SSID on the router side forces your client-side (Laptop, Xbox.. etc) to actively ping over the air to try and find your router, that happens wherever you are which effectively compromises the privacy of your network configuration.

Not sure if all should be used or done, but I feel it's some good tips for those with wifi issues.

 

[froggyboy604]

These are some good tips on improving your wifi.

 

[VirusZero]

The comment section has some interesting/useful bits, possibly more than the actual article does.

Though for Gizmodo's article there are a lot of caveats...
1- Changing channels only helps if the area isn't already saturated. In highly clustered areas, like an apartment with 300+ people who all have their own wifi adapters, this may not do much good because the 2.4Ghz channels will be filled up so quickly and there isn't much you can do about it. (Unless you could somehow co-ordinate it so that floor one has to use freqencies 1-5-7 and apartments have to alternate between them. Then Floor 2 has 2-4-6. Floor 3 has 3-8-11, etc... and then hopefully floor 4 or 5 can use the same as floor 1 again. But that'd be incredibly difficult to get people to co-operate to set up.)

Granted if they're using a 5Ghz bandwidth then you've got more channels to work with. (And each has a smaller range so if you're 75 feet from someone, your signal will be weak enough they can use the same channel without affecting you much at all.)

2- Priorities will help sure, but only on slower internet speeds. Once you hit a speed like 50Mbps down and 25Mbps up there really isn't THAT much point in having prioritization anymore simply because your speed is high enough that multiple devices can use the internet without really running into issues. I mean you can stream Netflix in HD at 5Mbps... So you can have 10 HD Netflix streams going at once before you're going to run into issues.

4- Don't hide your SSID. It doesn't protect you at all, it just makes your devices exposed. See the lifehacker article for more.

5- Upgrading firmware can potentially help at times... But not always. Sometimes it just adds new issues (especially if your hardware is older/slowing down). And you really have to be certain to get the right firmware otherwise you'll risk causing your router to be inoperable (until you can get the proper firmware). Which, if you need your router to connect to the internet... May mean you can't fix it. So sometimes it's best not to mess with this. Even moreso if your router is working great as is (don't fix what isn't broken afterall).