Anybody who has tried to deploy a wireless router has run into the issue of wondering if the network assuredly will work in any place it is intended. Wireless networks are significantly more complex to set up than a wired Ethernet network for the following four reasons:
- Wireless network obviously have no wires development it difficult to conclude where devices, such as laptops, are connected
- Neighboring networks do not stop at the wall boundary in the middle of your properties
- There are a plethora of configuration options for WiFi that most habitancy don't understand
- The WiFi found of the end devices (laptops, iPhones, etc.) have a huge impact on the extensive performance
Setting up a wireless network has basically been a trial and error affair. You set up the network, walk colse to with your laptop, look at the whole of bars in the display, and try to download a few web pages to see if the network works. The question with this approach is that you never assuredly know if you just got your network going "good enough" or if you assuredly achieved the best operation and robustness possible.
Recently, a new, totally free stock named WaveDeploy has become available that will allow you to know that you are getting the most out of your network. WaveDeploy allows you to assuredly see your network's operation on a map of your house. It also helps you see where your neighbors' networks are leaking into your house so you can plan accordingly. So, how does one use WaveDeploy to form out how to configure the network? A simple, but productive 5 step plan is to do the following:
- Even before turning on your wireless router, guide a "passive" estimate to conclude which other networks are graphic in your house and what channels they are using.
- Configure your wireless router to use the best channel based on the data measured above
- Run an "active" estimate using your laptop to see how well the network is delivering data to each location in your home
- Experiment with the wireless router settings and retest to improve performance
- Experiment and retest with client settings and retest to maximize performance
Start by downloading and installing WaveDeploy Basic on your wireless laptop. You will need to register to use the application the first time you run it, but it is assuredly free and VeriWave, the company that develops WaveDeploy, does not share your information with any surface parties.
The next step is to draw a map of your house's floor plan (or download and image from Google maps if you are lucky adequate to have a large adequate house!) using a tool such as Microsoft Paint. Do your best to draw the map as much to scale as possible, but perceive that it does not need to be 100% accurate. Spend 15 minutes development the best drawing you can and save it to an image file (bmp, png, or jpeg formats are all fine).
Follow the directions in the help file for running a passive estimate using WaveDeploy Basic. In short, you will start the application, load the floor plan image of your home, and then guide a whole of measurements in separate locations in your home. To make a measurement, click on the location corresponding to where you are standing and WaveDeploy will scan the air and measure which networks are visible, the channel that they are on, and measure the signal power of each network. It takes about seven seconds to make a measurement. Then walk to the next location and repeat. In about 10 minutes, you will have measurements for your whole home.
Stop the estimate and view the results. You will see a list of all networks that your laptop detected in your home drawn on your map. Green means that the network was received strongly; red means that it was detected weakly. Pay single concentration to note which channels were used for signals that were received strongly in the majority of your house. You will want to avoid using these channels for your wireless network.
Now set the channel for your wireless router. Start by checking the manufacturer's information for the router or the configuration of the router to conclude whether you are using the 2.4 Ghz or the 5 Ghz band. More than likely you are in the 2.4 Ghz band where you should assuredly only use channels 1, 6, and 11. Yes, there are other channels in this band, but don't use them as tempting as it may be. It turns out that these other channels overlap so that channel 2 will also interfere with channel 1 and channel 6 resulting in poorer performance. In the 2.4 Ghz band, you are better off sticking to channel s 1, 6, and 11 and configuring your wireless router to transmit on the channel with the least whole of competition.
While we're at it, we would be remiss if we didn't mention the field of security. Professional grade safety has been available for wireless networks and devices for a merge of years now. If supported by all of your devices, your best bet is to use Wpa2, also known as Aes encryption, with Psk or password authentication. The terms are complicated, but it is easy adequate to just select Wpa2 and enter a password. Then configure the client devices to entrance the network using the same safety setting and password. If Wpa2 is not available, then use Wpa or Tkip with Psk. This safety setting is still very good, but not quite as strong as Wpa2. If that doesn't work, you can use no authentication, also known as "open". You may see Wep available, but its use is not recommended. Wep was once concept to be secure, but it was cracked years ago and a whole of tools exist that will now automatically decrypt these messages. Wep is hazardous in that it gives users a very false sense of security. They will think that they are protected when the reality is that a basic hacker could assuredly entrance their data. Note that you must select a safety mechanism that is supported by your laptops and smart phones as well as the wireless router.
You can run other passive estimate at this point, and it will show you the areas where your wireless router's signal can be seen clearly. However, if a second computer is available, it is much better to use it with WaveDeploy to guide an active assessment. In an active assessment, data is transferred in the middle of the two computers to measure the maximum download speed that your network supports at each location in increasing to the signal coverage and interference. Once again, refer to the help files in the application for instructions to configure an active assessment.
It takes a miniature longer to guide an active assessment, but when you are done your efforts will be rewarded with a map called a "HeatWave" of how quickly your wireless network could deliver traffic to your laptop at each location in your home. You may be surprised to learn that the fancy 802.11n router that you just purchased can only deliver a fraction of the promised 300 Mbps performance! Part of this is due to marketing specsmanship; WaveDeploy Basic measures the whole application traffic, such as web pages, that a network can transfer. Marketing numbers for networking devices refer to the raw corporal speed of the network technology without taking into list all of the overhead of the wireless protocols or general network overhead. In practice, one can normally only achieve about half of the advertised operation as a best case once this overhead is taken into account. In a poorly designed or poorly placed wireless router the operation can be much worse.
To that end, begin changing the configurations in the router to see which settings furnish a sizable improvement in performance. For example, one of the biggest gains is often the result of disabling reserve for 802.11b. If all of your laptops are a, g, or n then disable 802.11b reserve and retest. Work your way through each of the options and retake the data to conclude which ones help your operation and which ones do not. Once you are complete with tuning your network, repeat the exercise by changing the settings on your laptop driver or smart phone and retesting.
The whole process may take a merge of hours, but the endeavor is well worth your time. Using the above techniques provides you a means to see where your network reaches, conclude how you fast your network performs by location, view interference from neighboring networks, and optimize your laptops and smart phones for the best possible performance. Applied properly, these five simple steps will make your wireless network fly!
WiFi - Optimize Your Wireless Network in Five easy Steps