If your online experience at home doesn't seem like it's performing well enough for teaching, learning, research, meetings, or other needs, we can help. Here are some simple steps to try, and help we can offer.
Who to call first:
- Believe it or not, the best first contact for home WiFi problems is usually the support team at your Internet Service Provider. They can examine your home network performance in ways we can't, and can tell you if your modem is too old for current devices, and whether you're really receiving the bandwidth you're paying for. Use their online chat or phone support and let them walk you through their recommendations. We've found they fix many issues.
What you can can try yourself:
- Restart your router and computer, it may perk up immediately.
- Free up computer resources by closing unused tabs and programs.
- Put your router out in the open, in a central spot. Try to minimize the number of walls and floors between you and the router.
- If your device shows you two two similar network names in your home, one that ends in '2.4' and one that ends in '5', try connecting to the one ending in '5' first. That one's the faster one, though it's not as good as the '2.4' one at getting through walls and reaching a long distance from the router.
- If you bought your own WiFi router and it's more than 3 or 4 years old, it might be a good time to upgrade to take advantage of faster speeds. The Wirecutter (by the New York Times) is a good review site for personal technology including simple WiFi routers and WiFi mesh systems for larger homes.
- As an alternative, talk to your cell phone provider. Many of them are activating cell phone hotspot service at low or no cost right now. This can give you your own separate connection that has surprisingly good performance in most cases.
We can help too!
- If none of these tips help, we are offering personal consultations with our networking experts. Book an appointment online so we can better understand your setup, learn your needs, and provide more specific solutions. We may not be able to immediately fix your problem, but we'll do what we can.