You are calmly at home watching a series in streaming, browsing the Web, playing online or making a video call from your PC and the wireless connection does not work well, goes slower than normal, it cuts every so often, it disconnects you and interrupts your activities.
The immediate for many is blame your operator, to think that the router that your ISP has given you is very bad or that the rest of the home network equipment such as WiFi extenders or PLCs are having a problem. You check it and everything seems fine, what could be wrong?
Well maybe the problem be on the other side of your walls and it’s a matter of interference with neighbors’ WiFi networks the one that is degrading the quality of your wireless network preventing you from connecting in a stable way and with good speed. What can you do?
Mapping available channels
WiFi networks work thanks to what are called electromagnetic spectrum “channels”. They are like lanes on a highway that our data travels on in each frequency band. Each wireless access point or router establishes a WiFi connection based on one or more of these channels, directing all the traffic it handles through them.
If this channel is saturated by multiple connections, such as the neighbors WiFi networks, or has interference from other nearby channels, the connection will suffer from lost packet problems, a reduction in speed, increases in latency and therefore a worse quality that can sometimes even cause micro-cuts or very fast speeds. lower than those theoretically achievable with our equipment.
If the interference in the WiFi channels is very high, you will probably never achieve a good connection speed
It does not matter if we change the “lousy” router of the operator for the best on the market or that we buy a new generation computer or mobile. If these interferences in the WiFi channels are very high probably you will never achieve good speed.
Therefore, if you start to have problems connecting to your home WiFi, the first thing you can do is a mapping or drawing of the general situation of the WiFi channels around you to see which ones are freer and find out if there are any that offer less interference. It is something we can do room by room, since in general the connections of the neighbors will seep with different intensity through the different walls of the house.
How to find these free and interference channels? Well, fortunately there are many applications that give us information about our wireless connection, each with its advantages and disadvantages, free or paid. One of my favorites is WiFi Analyzer, available for free for Android and Windows 10 (in this case you just have to look for it in the application store), a software that gives us this information showing the signal strength of each frequency band.
In the graphs we are shown for each frequency band (2.4 and 5 GHz) all the WiFi connections that our network adapter is capable of detecting, drawing their intensity with lines or overlapping curves and placing each connection on the channel to which it is associated.
In this way it is possible to observe at a single glance which channels are free and which are full of connections and interferences, thus being able to move our connection to the clearest to have the best possible quality and speed.
If we press the “View” button at the top of the screen we can also obtain a “Channel Score” that helps us so that instead of a graph, the application rates the channels with stars, showing with more stars those that are less saturated, and therefore those that are best for us to use.
How do I move the WiFi connection to another channel
Routers usually choose automatically the available channel as soon as it is restarted depending on certain parameters such as interference, but in the most basic models they are not always capable of changing by themselves when one of them is saturated or this choice is not always the most appropriate.
If you want to change the channel, something that you can do as many times as you want to always have the best connection, you just have to enter the router through the classic link http://192.168.1.1 in the web browser (or a similar one, for which we recommend you see the instructions for each specific router), look for the WiFi network configuration and find there the option corresponding to the channels.
In the menu we will choose the one that suits us best in each case and thus we will improve the quality of our wireless connection (here you have a more detailed manual to do it).