Extending reach of your wifi

Paying for super fast broadband at home or the office is great, however most of us need wifi in more than one room so we look at how you go about extending reach of your wifi.

The latest routers will give you both 2.4Ghz and 5GHz, with most of opting to link to the newer 5Ghz. Why? Because it is faster so that’s what we mostly default to.

The thing being here, to help you get better management of your wifi, better traffic management, you should use both.

Internet Traffic Management

Starting with installing a DrayTek router, traffic management can be taken care of automatically. Using a router like the Vigor 2865Lac for example, allows you to have your broadband plugged in and then have 2 additional channels for traffic. Assuming you’re a small business or home office and you’re only paying for 1 broadband line, these 2 4G SIMs, which you can get cheaply enough on an ‘unlimited data’, can give you some great speed.

The Vigor 2865Lac would then use all 3 of these channels to manage your internet traffic helping you to maintain good connectivity. You shouldn’t however, forget to use the 2 channels between the 2.4 and 5Ghz.

The other big benefit to having these SIM cards in the router is that they act as a failover backup. Should your main internet go down, the router will automatically with all your traffic to the SIM cards helping to keep you online.

Why use 2.4Ghz when its slower?

Yes, it is slower than 5Ghz however, it reaches further and can go through walls more easily than the 5Ghz. This then could be ideal for reaching other parts of the garden or house. Equally it should be used for non-critical online services, maybe smart lighting controls and even other machines or users who don’t need high bandwidth and speed. It is one easy step you can do at home if you’ve got dual band wifi.

Extending your wifi reach

If you want to maximise the speed of your wifi around a larger space, adding in access points will give you a quick win. Either as a single plug-in extender or to create a bigger mesh with up to 7 AP’s linked together.

With a simple plug-and-play set up, the DrayTek Access points can be up and running in minutes. Using a free app, you can set up your own mesh, using single passwords across your network for a seamless transition. The app can then alert you when one of the access points drop but equally, the others will then pick up the strain helping you to keep online.

With the option for an outside ruggedised router, you can extend the reach to the garden or outside spaces. If adding power can be an issue and you want to upgrade to Wifi6, there is a wall or ceiling mounted option which can be powered by a PoE (power over ethernet) connection.

With DrayTek, we have an entire range of professional grade routers and access points and switches for virtually any size home, home-office or network needs. Talk to us about your needs and let us help you keep you connected.