How to boost your WiFi speed by choosing the right channel

[Snederevac1]

Wireless networks have come a long way in the past 15 years. And yet, sustained WiFi speeds are still a vexing problem in a lot of situations. A number of things can come into play, such as the way your router is set up, whether there’s nearby interference, if you live in an apartment building or a separate house, and how far apart your devices are from the router. Fortunately, there’s always a way to fix slow transfer speeds.

 

If you’ve ever messed around with your WiFi router’s settings, you’ve probably seen the word channel. Most routers have the channel set to Auto, but I’m sure many of us have looked through that list of a dozen or so channels and wondered what they are, and more importantly, which of the channels are faster than the others. Well, it turns out some channels are indeed much faster — but that doesn’t mean you should go ahead and change them just yet. Read on to find out more about 802.11 channels, interference, and the massive difference between 2.4GHz and 5GHz WiFi.

 

Channels 1, 6, and 11

 

First of all, let’s talk about 2.4GHz, because as of the start of 2015, almost all WiFi installations still use the 2.4GHz band. 802.11ac, which debuted in 2013, is driving adoption of 5GHz — but thanks to backwards compatibility and dual-radio routers and devices, 2.4GHz will continue to reign for a while.

 

All of the versions of WiFi up to and including 802.11n (a, b, g, n) operate between the frequencies of 2400 and 2500MHz. These paltry 100MHz are separated into 14 channels of 20MHz each. As you’ve probably worked out, 14 lots of 20MHz is a lot more than 100MHz — and as a result, every 2.4GHz channel overlaps with at least two (but usually four) other channels (see diagram above). As you can probably imagine, using overlapping channels is bad — in fact, it’s the primary reason for awful throughput on your wireless network.

 

Fortunately, channels 1, 6, and 11 are spaced far enough apart that they don’t overlap. On a non-MIMO setup (i.e. 802.11 a, b, or g) you should always try to use channel 1, 6, or 11. If you use 802.11n with 20MHz channels, stick to channels 1, 6, and 11 — if you want to use 40MHz channels, be aware that the airwaves might be very congested, unless you live in a detached house in the middle of nowhere.