How to boost your Wi-Fi while working and isolating at home
BT can keep you connected while the whole family is indoors
For all its benefits, working from home places a high strain on your already-overburdened Wi-Fi. But before you switch broadband provider in an effort to improve your lousy speeds, it’s worth exploring the steps you can take to boost your home Wi-Fi without starting from scratch.
In this article, we will explore the issues you might be facing with your Wi-Fi, including weak signal and overloaded networks, and how to make sure that it is operating at peak performance during a period when you need it the most.
The new demands on your Wi-Fi
Working from home has the potential to put extra demands on your Wi-Fi. From sharing large files to the new normal of calling into daily meetings, your network may be dealing with an unusually high level of traffic.
Many of us will likely be turning to streaming services to entertain us in place of socialising, while families with children will want to occupy them with various online services from videos to gaming. All of this may be more than your router can handle on its own.
At the same time, any existing weaknesses in your home Wi-Fi are likely to become more pronounced. Dead spots and weak signals can result from poor coverage and interference caused by various materials, appliances and other objects. While your family is spending more time at home, the ideal is that every room and area will receive reliable Wi-Fi coverage, permitting online work and entertainment to take place anywhere you wish – but this may not be the reality.
How to boost your network
A simple first step is to review the positioning of your router, placing it in as central a location in your home as possible (or closest to the areas where you are most in need of coverage) and rearranging any objects that might be causing interference.
Of course, there are limits to how much you can rearrange your home. The position of outlets may prevent you from placing your router in what would otherwise be the optimum position, and the size and structure of your home may just be too much for one router to cover effectively. In these cases, a great solution is to invest in a mesh Wi-Fi system like BT Whole Home Wi-Fi.
Mesh Wi-Fi uses a series of interconnected routers to create a network throughout your home, providing a strong and steady signal that will banish pesky dead spots. BT’s intelligent Whole Home Wi-Fi system works with all broadband providers and guarantees coverage so that your family can keep their various devices connected wherever they are in the house. The Whole Home Wi-Fi app advises where best to locate BT’s network ‘discs’ for best coverage, as well as allowing parents to put limits on children’s screen time – essential to prevent them from doing nothing but streaming videos 24 hours a day. BT offers three solutions for differing needs – Mini Whole Home Wi-Fi, Whole Home Wi-Fi and Premium Whole Home Wi-Fi.
These supercharged networks are also ready to face the extra challenges placed upon them by your increased usage. BT Whole Home Wi-Fi automatically connects everyone to the fastest, strongest signal available, allowing you to connect multiple devices without losing speed – and ensuring that streaming, downloading and conference calling goes off without a hitch.
We’re going to be working our Wi-Fi very hard for the time being, and mesh networks offer a simple and reliable way of making sure that we can stay connected.
