This is the first of the series, The WiFi and You, which aims at educating the readers about the wireless network in a simplistic approach.
Did you know that you, as a consumer, also have a role to play in the quality of experience you get from your home WiFi? You can influence the quality of service you experience from your home WiFi in a number of ways. Although you would not be able to get beyond the design limits capped on your devices by the various makers. However, you could fully optimize your subscription packages.
A number of factors affect the throughput of your home WiFi and I would like to help you see how you could be positioned to leverage them.
Before we go deep, let us take a few moment through the definition of some terminologies you might encounter in the course of this reading. This would help with a clearer understanding of the entire write up. If you are quite familiar with them, you might skip this part.
Throughput: It describes how much data, in form of packets, can be successfully transferred from one point to another in a given time. This explains why it is measured in bits per seconds- often in Mbps (Megabit per seconds). In the case of a home setting, this data transfer could be from the WiFi Access Point (also known as a router, in many cases) to your phone, laptop, smart TV, or any other IP device. The throughput is the basic factor of performance measurement.
Bandwidth: While throughput describes how much exact data is transferred in a given time, bandwidth describes how much data can be theoretically transferred in a given time. This is why you come across words like “up to” being used to describe a data subscription plan by service providers. You see words like: “speed up to 100 Mbps”, “download speed up to 50 Mbps” etc. They are careful not to say what the exact throughput or speed would be because, what you eventually get, as a user, is beyond their immediate realm of control. Some of the factors of control, which could be influenced by you, are those that would be discussed in the other part of this write up.
Data rate: It describes the speed at which data is transferred from one point to the other.
Access Point: An access point is basically a device that allows your wireless devices, like phones, smart TV, tablets or laptops, to connect to a network. It is like the connecting link between your devices and the service your internet service provider offers. It could be a router, switch, modem or any form of a compact wireless transceiver.
It is also important to mention the concept of download and upload speed. The former describes the speed at which data is being transferred and delivered to you from the internet, while the latter describes the speed of data transfer from your devices to the internet.
To the question of how you can have a better home WiFi experience, let us look at the following points. These are just a few from the list of points. Having them at the back of your minds, either at the point of installation or when the need for troubleshooting arises, would help in optimizing your subscriptions.
The positioning of the Access Point:
This is a cogent factor when it comes to setting up your home network. WiFi Access Points are best placed at a central point, where the prospective connecting devices are not blocked by a large number of partitions or obstacles. There is a limit to how much signals can travel in the face of obstacles and obstructions. The lower the obstacles the signals have to travel, the better.
It is a recommended practice to have Access Points raised, when considering where they are to be installed, so the emitting signals could spread more evenly. It is also an equally good idea to move them away from electronic or magnetic devices, like microwave or some sort of strong antennas, which could cause interference and easily reduce the quality of the signal you would eventually get on your devices.
Performance anomaly:
In WiFi networks, there is a phenomenon known as performance anomaly. To explain this, let us create a scenario where devices A, B and C, with different data rates, are connected to the same access point. As part our assumption, let us take the device C to have the lowest data rate- due to its configuration. The throughput that would be experienced by the three connecting devices would be affected drastically because of the low data rate of device C. This is because the wireless network operates a shared medium. It therefore does not matter whether the data rates of the other two devices are high or not, they would never experience a high data rate.
This also applies to when one of the devices is relatively farther to the Access Point compared to the others. The farthest device, which would- as expected- experience some poor network signals, would rub on the aggregate throughput, and invariably, the throughput of the other devices as they all connect to the same medium. Also, a device with an older WiFi standard, whose capacity does not match those of the others, would reduce the quality of signal they all receive from the Access Point. This phenomena is also sometimes described as throughput unfairness in WiFi. The slower devices penalize the faster ones, and they all get to experience a slow connection.
Therefore, it behooves of you to ensure that the devices that would be connected to your home router all have similar or the same WiFi standards, and none is unnecessarily far away from the access point.
Number of connected devices:
Also, the higher the number of devices connected, depending on the capacity of your Access Point, the slower the experience might be. Remember that it is a shared channel and it has to be divided among all the connecting devices.
In conclusion, always remember that in reality, the maximum advertised capacity by the internet service provider might never be reached. WiFi operates a half-duplex, where transmission and reception cannot be done simultaneously. This implies that the uplink and downlink have to share the capacity of the wireless channel. As a result, the advertised capacity is shared between the downlink and uplink, although the downlink tends to get more share, because there is more demand on it than on the uplink. So in reality, the downlink capacity might just be around 66% of what has been advertised to you.
Thank you!
REFERENCES
Martin Heusse, Franck Rousseau, Gilles Berger-Sabbatel, Andrzej Duda “Performance Anomaly of 802.11b” IEEE INFOCOM 2003
https://www.4gon.co.uk/solutions/technical_factors_affecting_wireless_performance.php
https://www.cnet.com/how-to/best-location-for-router/
https://7signal.com/multi-gbps-ethernet-access-point-connections/
