WiFi is a modern miracle that can degenerate into modern misery: Either it just works, or it fails unpredictably, illogically and irritatingly.
Maybe you’ll see speeds drop for no apparent reason, leaving images on webpages missing as if you were on AOL dial-up. Or your laptop or tablet will fall off the network in the middle of a video call. Or your device won’t connect to or even see the WiFi network it used the day before.
Even WiFi’s error messages can be terrible: Windows’ “Can’t connect to this network” error might as well have been written to inspire rage.
So while the underlying technology has advanced greatly over the last 25 years — setting up a new wireless network no longer requires the bizarre gyrations it once did, and it now supports connection speeds that formerly required an Ethernet network cable — WiFi remains a regular source of gadget grief.
Reducing that, unfortunately, would probably require buying new hardware — and rules from the Federal Communications Commission may limit your choices.
Try a team of routers called mesh
The pandemic’s abrupt shift to working from home — for many people, a permanent shift — exposed the frailty of many home WiFi setups. The answer you’ll get from networking professionals about how to fix that: mesh.
Instead of relying on a single router to broadcast connectivity throughout a residence, mesh WiFi networks employ two, three or more routers that work as a team. They used to carry upgraded pricing but have become increasingly affordable, with prices for well-reviewed systems starting at $200.
Glenn Fleishman, author of the how-to book “Take Control of Wi-Fi Networking and Security,” called mesh “probably the best thing given the current pricing.”
The construction of your own home may make mesh even more mandatory. The plaster walls in many older homes, with chicken wire holding plaster to slats of wood, can slow or stop WiFi signals even over short distances.
I know this firsthand, living in a 1920 vintage bungalow — where I foolishly cheaped out by buying a stand-alone router instead of a mesh system on the last upgrade cycle.
Anshel Sag, a principal analyst at the research firm Moor Insights & Strategy, pointed to another common and easily made mistake: sticking with whatever router their internet provider offered, often with a monthly lease fee attached.
Wired still beats wireless
If you can set up a wired connection for an especially important computer, use that and you won’t have worry about signals fading or failing or having the software inside a WiFi router — which is essentially a miniature computer — glitching out.
“Wired is still king,” Sag observed.
Fleishman has multiple WiFi routers in his old house but also has Ethernet strung through many of its rooms, and he set up power-line adapters — small boxes that use existing electrical wiring to extend a network — to back that up.
The latter remedy doesn’t require running new cables through walls but isn’t the cheapest fix either, with pairs of adapters costing $100 and change, and it can lead to interference issues.
You can also convert dormant cable-TV jacks into network extensions using “MoCa” adapters, which also start at $100.
If you regularly use your phone’s mobile-hotspot function to share its bandwidth with your laptop or tablet, try plugging your phone into that device with a USB-C cable instead to set up a wired connection.
That should both perform better and leave much less of a dent in your phone’s battery life because it doesn’t have to broadcast its own WiFi signal — and since this technique doesn’t require any new hardware, it’s free as well.
Wait for WiFi 8
After years of expecting shoppers to decipher alphanumeric version identifiers like 802.11n or 802.11ax, wireless-router vendors finally decided to go with simple numbers that you can look for on a new router and in any computers. We’re now up to WiFi 7, which debuted in January 2024 and delivered speed improvements over WiFi 6; WiFi 8, coming on routers next year, focuses more on reliability in tricky network scenarios.
“I do think people’s coverage and performance will improve, even if the top-line performance numbers don’t seem any higher,” Sag predicted. For the best improvement, you’ll need both your next laptop and router to support 8. It may take some time for computer vendors to support WiFi 8; Apple, for instance, didn’t add WiFi 7 support to its MacBook Air lineup until March.
But the FCC’s surprise decision in March to ban imports of new models of foreign-manufactured wireless routers threatens that upgrade. The FCC cited the potential of foreign adversaries remotely taking over home routers, as alleged in the Volt Typhoon campaign of Chinese attackers.
Its consumer guidance, however, doesn’t identify specific vulnerabilities in home routers, not even the TP-Link models that have drawn criticism over their manufacturer’s previous ownership by a Chinese firm, and tells router users that they “do not need to do anything.”
(Consumers should change the username and password they use to manage a router from the default and install any software updates available for the router.)
Federal regulators has since set up a “conditional approvals” process that has green-lit models from such vendors as Asus, Amazon-owned Eero, Netgear and Starlink. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.) The FCC’s press office did not answer a query sent Monday about whether this process has helped router vendors find and fix any vulnerabilities.
Sag called the FCC’s move pointless: “The program really caught the industry off guard and didn’t help consumers in any way.”
A separate FCC program, the Cyber Trust Mark label, should provide useful guidance to shoppers by spotlighting products that passed independent security tests. But early hopes of products shipping with this voluntary label by 2024 soon faded, with the best-case scenario being sometime in late 2027.
In the meantime, you can always try one other WiFi-debugging trick that works surprisingly well even if it’s a tech-support cliché: Turn the router off and back on again.
The post Why WiFi can still be so annoying — and how to fix it appeared first on Washington Post.
