Speaker A
You know, it's never any fun when you have to deal with slow Wi-Fi speeds or maybe your signal strength isn't that strong and is unstable. Well, in today's video, we are going to be talking about five different ways for you to boost your signal strength and speed. So, let's get ready to take full advantage of our internet. Welcome, everybody, to our home networking basics series. This is video number five of the series. We've been going step by step on building out your home network. Now, I will leave a link below of this playlist if you guys want to check it out. It'll also be at the end of this video, so you guys can check that out too if you want to do that. We've gone through a lot of topics. This video, we're going to be boosting our internet strength and speed. Next week, we'll be rounding out this series with going over steps to avoid network hackers. Now, I also want to encourage you guys to follow me on my other social media sites. The big one that I do is Instagram, which I will link down here, and the other big one is Amazon. So, I have an Amazon storefront that you guys can check out of different products that I recommend. It's a pretty cool thing. Go ahead and follow me over there. Also, one last thing, if you guys can give this video a thumbs up, it does improve the YouTube algorithm and it really helps get this video pushed out to a lot of people. So, I would greatly appreciate if you guys could do that on this video too. Now, if you have any questions about this video, leave it in the comments below. Also, don't forget to subscribe for more content like this, and let's go ahead and jump into the topics. Now, the first thing I would recommend you doing before anything else is to check the firmware on your wireless router. Now, there are so many different brands, types, and styles of routers that it's hard to really narrow down the best way to do the update, but for me, I have got the TP-Link Deco system, so that has an app for me to go in and check my firmware. If you don't have a Wi-Fi system that has an app, you're going to need to log in as the administrator through their web portal. So, you're going to go ahead and get logged in. If you're not sure what the username and password is, I recommend checking it out on the side of the device. Sometimes on the side or the bottom of the device, they will have the admin username and password. If this is something that you manually set up yourself, hopefully you wrote it down. But if you did, go ahead and log in to your Wi-Fi router and check for updates. You can either check for updates, or if it doesn't have an option for you to check for updates, you may have to go to the actual manufacturer website and do a search for your model and see if there are updated firmware available. If we take a look at mine right here, I've got my TP-Link Deco app loaded up right here. What I'm going to do is on the very bottom, I'm going to click on the More tab, scroll all the way up, and at the bottom is System. So, all I have to do is tap on there, click on Update Deco, and it's going to check for updates. If there are updates, it should be good to go. Now, the reason you're going to want to update that software is that through the lifespan of that device, the manufacturer is going to be able to iron out any bugs that the system might have had, give it improvement updates on speed, reliability, signal strength. So, a lot of that stuff is going to come through firmware updates. So, number one, make sure that your Wi-Fi router is up to date. The next thing I would do is consider changing your Wi-Fi channels. Essentially, your channels are the frequencies that your Wi-Fi uses to transfer data, and there are typically about 11 different channels that you can use on your Wi-Fi router. If you live in a densely populated area like an apartment building, a lot of the Wi-Fi routers might be using the same channel, causing congestion. So, changing your channel can help avoid interference and help you improve performance. To change these settings, we need to go into our router's interface. Either that's going to be through a web portal or through the app. Once we've logged in with the admin name and password, we're going to go ahead and click on Wi-Fi. From here, you should have the option to change channels on a 2.4 gigahertz frequency. You should have the option of picking between 11 different channels. Go ahead and select a different channel and see if that improves your performance. Now, some routers are going to have the option for Auto. If you do not see that option, you may want to do that for a more updated version to get that option, but Auto should allow your router to select the best channel for your Wi-Fi to perform on. The next thing you're going to want to do is kick off any Wi-Fi intruders. These are people who might have gained access to your Wi-Fi and are using those resources, whether that be that you left the default username and password, which is easily guessable, or you're using a password that isn't very strong. One thing that you can do is you can log into your Wi-Fi router and see what devices are currently connected. If I take a look here, this is something that we talked about in one of the previous videos, but if I take a look here on this device, this is actually my old network. So, this is my old Google Nest network that I had set up, and I go through here and I look at these different names, and some of these I don't recognize. Like, we have one here that says unnamed device. We have WLAN on here. We've got, you know, so many different things. Look at all this idle stuff. I don't even recognize half of this stuff that is sitting here idled on my device right now. This could be things like your neighbors. Maybe you live in an apartment complex with neighbors all around you connecting and using the resources that you are paying for. Now, another thing that I recommend is as devices are connecting to your Wi-Fi network, go ahead and customize their names. If I tap on this one right here, it's unnamed device. Up here in device name, I can actually tap on that and give it its own custom name. So, when I created a new home network system for my house, as things were connecting to it, I was giving them custom names so I knew what they were. No more of this unknown device, unknown name, or random name that I just don't know what it is. I now know everything that is going to be connecting to my Wi-Fi router. So, when I go back, I can see if something should not be there. The next thing I'd recommend changing in your Wi-Fi settings is your DNS server. Essentially, what this is, is it's like a phone book for the internet. When you type in the name of a website, so it's google.com, yahoo.com, youtube.com, the DNS resolver will figure out what IP address is associated with that name and connects you to that website. Now, by default, your router is going to use your internet service provider's DNS server. The bad thing about this is that they can then track all of that traffic going through their DNS. It's going to be able to see what websites you're going to, what you're searching for, where you are going, and then it can go ahead and sell that information to third-party companies to use as targeted ads for you. Now, thankfully, you can bypass this altogether and manually put in a DNS server that you want to use. Now, the two DNS servers that I recommend using are either Google's, which is 8.8.8.8, or Cloudflare's, which is 1.1.1.1. Let's go ahead and jump into the settings of my router and update my DNS. Okay, so in my app right here, we're going to go to the More at the bottom, click on Advanced, and I'm going to go to my DHCP server. From here, I'm going to go ahead and click on Primary DNS, and we're going to put in 1.1.1.1. And for a secondary for this one, we're going to do 1.0.0.1. So, this is going to be super fast. This is for Cloudflare. If we want to do Google, I'll put 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 for Google. Now that we have our DNS updated, our website should load up faster and not be tracked by our internet service provider. The last one on this list, which we went into depth...
