Tip of the Week: Optimize Your Wi-Fi with These Practices

Wi-Fi is a very important component in the modern office, which makes it critical that it operates well. Let’s go over a few tips to help you get the highest available speeds out of your business’ wireless connection. 

Adjust Your Business’ Wi-Fi Network

It is fairly common practice for businesses to offer Wi-Fi connectivity to not just their staff members, but also the clients and customers who visit them. This can create a challenge, however, when it comes to both your business’ security and your Internet’s reliability. Allowing visitors to access the bandwidth your employees need will only slow down your business’ essential processes, all the while potentially opening your network up to threats.

Fortunately, there are a few ways that these impacts can be avoided. From a security standpoint, utilizing a separate (and encrypted) WI-Fi connection for your guests to use will help you prevent potential malware infections from infecting the network your team uses to access data. As an added benefit, it also allows you to provide your team with connectivity first, ensuring that your clients and customers aren’t slowing them down in that sense.

If your choice of Wi-Fi router supports it, you can even instruct the router itself to prioritize the bandwidth allocated to certain applications over others, ensuring that your processes are getting the bandwidth they need.

Minimize Sources of Interference

One of the quickest ways to speed up your Wi-Fi connection is to eliminate any factors that may slow it down. While you may be tempted to hide your router away for the sake of aesthetics, doing so can throttle your connection. The same can be said of crowded areas, as any obstacles will interfere with your signal as well. This includes other electronic devices and appliances, building materials, and even radio waves.

Do your best to position your equipment so that this kind of interference is avoided… which means keeping it out in the open, not hidden away in a closet somewhere. Keeping it in a centralized area also helps to accomplish this.

Augment Your Networking Equipment

Finally, there’s the simplest solution to improving your business’ Internet connection: increasing the signal by simply increasing the number of access points you utilize. External antennas, range extenders, and mesh networking can all be used to boost the range your signal has.

Want help implementing any of these tips? Give us a call. We can evaluate your network and diagnose different ways that we can address these shortcomings. Reach out at (509) 534-1530 today.