What affects WiFi speed

Posted January 8th, 2021 by Gary & filed under Blog, WiFi Cabling.

: Wifi Access Point Installation

: Warehouse Wifi

In a business or enterprise, there may be various factors regarding what affects WiFi speed. Furthermore, performance, coverage, or connection speed. Some are easy to fix, others require troubleshooting or a high, technical level of investigation. Wi-Fi is now the way of the world and it is a necessity in the majority of buildings. When you rely on Wi-Fi, performance issues can cause problems with your efficiency. Unfortunately, Wi-Fi performance issues are not always easy to diagnose due to the way Wi-Fi works. An unknown changeable could potentially affect your Wi-Fi speed.

Many factors distress the value of your Wi-Fi connection. Seemingly trivial things, such as turning the router or placing it higher, can make the difference between a good video WiFi connection and a broken sequence of cut-in dialogues.

Here are just a few key factors of What affects WiFi speed

Antennas, Impact Coverage & WiFi Transmissions

The antenna in your service equipment may affect Wi-Fi coverage. Antennas have a significant effect on the Wi-Fi coverage your business or company receives. When looking at Wi-Fi performance, make sure the antenna is deployed or built into your Wi-Fi access points correctly. This is especially true with access points with additional external antennas. Antennas are usually located inside a building or office. However, they can also be set up from the outside. If your antenna is close to any structure, such as a metal grid or cement beam, it can affect Wi-Fi transmission.

Equipment Power Levels Affect WiFi Performance

The power level of your Wi-Fi equipment affects speed. It's not always good when it comes to WiFi power levels. The power levels transmitted through your access points are important and do not need to be sufficient for coverage. Power is not always specified on the data sheet or settings that come with your Wi-Fi equipment. WiFi coverage problems can be caused by low levels of electricity. Improvements can be made with the WiFi equipment's automatic power control algorithm. Therefore, detecting any neighbouring access points. Therefore, lower levels of transmission which then corrupts neighbouring access points results in increased performance.

Equipment Quality and Build

Industrial and government standards have strict requirements on the radio parameters of networking devices but do not meet specific performance requirements. As a result, the quality and performance of Wi-Fi networks also depend on the many design choices that manufacturers make. Some of these are deliberate choices, as manufacturers seek to cover the full scope of the price-performance spectrum. Others are specific to how the units are designs and built and what the manufacturer can do.

The RF Chain

An RF chain is the part of a smartphone, tablet, laptop, Wi-Fi access point, etc, which encodes, transmits, receives, and decodes radio signals. This quality is important for the quality and strength of the wireless signals, and the quality of the network connection they are carrying. Sometimes, RF chain standards are not very consistent. For example, a high-quality smartphone's network performance will be negatively affected by a poor quality Wi-Fi AP.

Environmental Factors

Hardware aside, practical knowledge shows that deploying the same tools in different environments results in different performance characteristics. Some environmental factors, such as when you install a wireless access point, are firmly under your control. Others, such as RF noise and interference, are not entirely up to you, so you need to keep these in mind when designing a Wi-Fi network. Different environments will create different challenges. Furthermore, those challenges will affect the performance of your WIFI system

RF Noise and Interference

All Wi-Fi devices operate in multiple frequency bands in the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz spectrum. The "all" part is very broad: it includes your Wi-Fi devices, your neighbour's Wi-Fi devices - they all work in this spectrum, and sometimes they can interfere with each other. This hurts the quality of Wi-Fi signals. Not all intervention is suitable for Wi-Fi strategy. Other wireless protocols, such as Bluetooth and ZigBee, run in the same frequency band as Wi-Fi. And sometimes interference is completely accidental: USB 3.0 cables with a bad screen, for example, can produce significant RF noise. Unusual cases such as a staff canteen microwave have also been known to affect data networks

The presence of RF interference reduces the performance of the Wi-Fi network, and its effects are due to the proximity of the Wi-Fi access point. As a result, wireless access points are placed so that they are close enough to any client's equipment, even if they do not interfere with each other yet.

WiFi Units Positioning

Most people do not underestimate the importance of choosing a good location for a Wi-Fi access point. Even a small change in positioning can make a huge difference in performance.

High vs Low. Placing your Wi-Fi router on the floor or behind other things usually leads to poor performance. Instead, keep the router as high as possible to increase the transmission range of the radio waves. It also helps to clear the router of possible interference. The unit must also be orientated in the correct way to maximise the antennas of the unit, This is regardless of them being internal or external antennas

Objects in the way such as concrete, plaster, and especially metal results in a negative effect that blocks Wi-Fi waves. Therefore, with wireless access points, the closer you block yourself to an obstruction like a brick wall, the more you block its signal.

The further you are from your router, the weaker the Wi-Fi signal. Therefore, the best option is to keep your access points as close to your devices as possible. An in-depth WIFI survey and design will calculate the optimum number of units to cover your devices without overpopulating

Device Installation

Being placed in the right place is not the only factor that affects performance. Many other factors related to the position of the access point have important consequences. For example, an antenna does not circulate RF signals evenly. Just above the antenna, there is a narrow region, where the signal strength is very low. An antenna's familiarity with client equipment and the surrounding environment (walls, structural elements) can affect the quality of the Wi-Fi signal.

Uplink Speed and Load

Locations with Wi-Fi access still need to connect to the rest of your network and then to the Internet. For example, traffic between different departments will pass through more devices than just one Wi-Fi access point. And, of course, Internet traffic passes through your ISP.

The performance of your Wi-Fi connection depends on how fast and busy the network is on the "other side" of the wireless access point. It's not something you can underestimate in the wireless aspect, but it's something you have to keep in mind. Wi-Fi traffic is very diverse. For example, smartphones can download hundreds of megabytes of firmware upgrades without even knowing. Therefore, when multiplied by a whole office this adds up very quickly.

Therefore, when considering what affects WiFi speed you need to consider all the elements involved

What affects WiFi speed