Not receiving a good Internet connection in your room, or anywhere else in the house, is annoying and a source of anger. It can happen because the Wi-Fi channel signal is saturated, it is lost before reaching your devices for different reasons and this makes your Internet speed slow. In any case, it is important to make sure that this is what affects. Now, how can we fix it?
A known issue
WiFi wireless connections have become essential in every self-respecting connected home. We use them to access the Internet from the smartphone, from laptops, tablets, but also for speakers, stereos, televisions and increasingly in the Internet of things.
Hence the importance of everything working correctly, offering us the maximum connection speed, with the minimum of latency, something that we cannot always achieve due to the interference of other networks through the WiFi channel that are operating around us.
It is what is called saturation of the WiFi channel, and that can sometimes be quite unpleasant. This is a problem that most have experienced, as WiFi networks often share the same channels, which causes these performance issues. Therefore, we can change the channel to have a stable connection at all times.
What is WiFi channel saturation
Although we can always resort to a WiFi amplifier or repeater, the simplest solution is sometimes to change from a channel with slow problems or cuts to a different one that is not saturated. But do we really know why this happens?
We must know that each WiFi network is broadcast on a single channel, numbered possible from 1 to 13. If in the same channel we have 3 or 4 WiFi networks trying to transmit information simultaneously, it will happen that the performance of the WiFi networks will be considerably degraded by saturation of the channel, which will influence that it can end up going slower than normal.
Luckily this type of problem has a simple solution, if our WiFi network is on a channel shared by other networks, simply change to another free channel to recover optimal network performance. For example; You can change the channel as many times as you want, check the result when changing to a new channel and if this is not satisfactory, change to another until you choose the one in which the network performance is optimal.
How to solve it
As we have said, the channels overlap each other, so that each saturated WiFi channel occupies a part of the spectrum of the underlying ones. The most advanced routers try to avoid saturation through a spectrum analyzer that helps to automatically select the best channel, but the ideal is to do it manually and check the operation with each one of them.
For this reason, it is recommended that we be able to identify which channels around us are in use, which ones have more traffic and which one is the most recommended for our home. Currently, and in an accessible way, there are applications like Wifi Analyzer for Android or Windows 10 (we just have to look for it in the app store) that give us this information by showing the saturation and strength of the signal of each frequency band. Its operation is very simple.
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From an Android smartphone or tablet (version 2.3 or higher), we access the Google app store, download and install the app.
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When we run the application, the first screen will already give us an idea of where we are moving, with a graph of the wireless spectrum in the 2.4 GHz band. We can also review the 5 Ghz in the same way if we have a router compatible with it.
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The image shows the wireless networks in the area, their SSID name, the channels occupied by each, and the relative strength of the signal. Ours is “Orion3”, the one with the most powerful signal and occupying a relatively clear range of channels. If you look at the ones that occupy channels 4 to 6, you will see that it is a very saturated range of the spectrum. That is what we intend to avoid with this type of tool.
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The application also offers other types of information, graph by time, list of APs and signal meters for each of them.
Now it will depend on the router that you have that the access is in one place or another, but basically we must look for the option to change the broadcast channel. Once the channel less saturated by the networks has been identified, we only have to enter the router, look for the WiFi network configuration and find the option corresponding to the channels. There we will choose the one that suits us best and thus improve the quality of our wireless connection.
Finally, the last task that we will have to address is to save the modifications (very important!) and we would have everything under control. In theory, what we should notice is a small cut at the beginning, but then an improvement in the connection. This is a great investment in maintenance tasks to improve the WiFi connection and increase the speed of data transmission.
