hi everyone kevin here today i want to show you how you can increase the speed of your wi-fi and this won’t cost anything at all we’re simply going to use existing equipments that you already have when you have slow wi-fi it’s just no fun at all i mean seriously how would you binge watch kevin videos on slow wi-fi before we check out the tips we need to determine how fast your internet connection speed is without using wi-fi later on we’ll run this same test using wi-fi to see if there’s any gap to do this you’re going to need an ethernet cable and then connect your computer directly to your cable modem or to your router then head to the website speedtest.net you’ll find a link up above and also down below in the description if you prefer you can also download an app from speedtest directly in the microsoft store the benefit of this is there are no ads and they also claim that it works better when you have a faster internet connection once you have the app installed make sure nothing else is running on your internet connection you can even pause this video and then press on the go button once you’ve finished running your test you’ll see three different metrics first you have the ping or the reaction time in milliseconds the lower the number the better this is basically the time it takes to send a request to a server to when you get a response back if you’re a gamer you want this number to be as low as possible next up you have your download speed and this is how quickly you can download something in megabits per second this is basically the size of the pipe coming into your house so the larger the number the better with a larger pipe you can watch more netflix shows on more devices at the same time lastly you also have the upload speed and this is also in megabits per second this is the size of the pipe leaving your house this will determine say how quickly you can upload a video to youtube once again the larger the number the better now we calculated all of these using ethernet so this represents the upper bound of what you can expect when we run this test again using wi-fi now that we know how fast your internet is the next thing you’ll likely want to do is check how this compares to the internet plan that you’re paying for or the internet plan that your neighbor is paying for here i’m on comcast and i can see the details of my plan it says i should be getting speeds up to 50 megabits per second down and 10 megabits per second up when i ran the test i was getting almost 120 megabits per second down now i’m getting way better performance than this plan advertises so between you and me i’m just not going to ask that many questions and i’m just going to stick with this but if you see a massive gap between what you expect to be getting and what you’re actually getting it might make sense to reach out to your internet service provider to ask them what’s going on there could be say a frayed cable or some other issue that they can come out and correct the next step is to connect to your wi-fi and then run through the speed test again if your wi-fi speed test performs pretty close to your wired connection speed test well that means that your wi-fi is already pretty optimized but if there’s a large gap between the two well that means there’s lots of opportunity for improvement so let’s check out some of these tips this brings us to tip number one you want to make sure that you place your wi-fi router in a central location here for example is a visual of what happens when you place your wi-fi router in an extreme corner of your house anytime your wi-fi signal say encounters walls or different obstacles that’ll weaken the signal and here in the top right hand corner in the kitchen you’ll notice that only a very weak signal makes it there if on the other hand you were to place the wi-fi router directly in the center of the house you’ll notice that the signal makes it to all of the rooms and it’s also a lot more powerful so this way you’ll get a much better connection speed in all of your rooms and tip number two use the 5 gigahertz frequency band when available most routers come with two different frequency bands you have 2.4 gigahertz and you have 5 gigahertz here for example when i click into available networks i see the two different options here i have 2.4 gigahertz and then i also have 5 gigahertz now the signal for 2.4 gigahertz is stronger so should i choose that one now even though the 2.4 gigahertz signal is stronger you still want to select the 5 gigahertz signal and the reason why is you’ll still be able to throughput a lot more data than with 2.4 gigahertz when you compare the two frequency bands five gigahertz is a much shorter signal so it can’t move through objects as easily and as a result it has a much shorter range but it makes up for that range deficiency by being able to transfer much more data not only is five gigahertz faster than 2.4 gigahertz but you’ll also find that fewer people use five gigahertz which should result in a more reliable connection here for example you can download a tool through the microsoft store called wi-fi analyzer this will show you all of the different wi-fi signals that your computer can detect and it’ll also show you what frequency band and channel they’re all on here when i look at 2.4 gigahertz you’ll notice that it is completely crowded with different signals when you use 2.4 gigahertz you’re in a sense competing with all of these different signals and that could result in some interference if i switch over to the five gigahertz view here you’ll notice that there are very few people using five gigahertz and in fact you have some channels completely open so i could have one of these channels all to myself and this will result in a more reliable connection to make this real i ran a speed test when i was connected to my 2.4 gigahertz network and i also ran one when i was connected to my 5 gigahertz network on 2.4 gigahertz i had much more variable download speeds likely due to interference from other networks on 5 gigahertz i got consistently fast download speeds so once again if you have the choice always go with five gigahertz at number three when possible you want to choose a channel that is completely open or has very little competition back again in the wi-fi analyzer here i am in the 5 gigahertz view and you can see that there are currently other signals on channel 36 153 and 157 so if i’m setting up a new network well i would choose one of these channels that doesn’t have a signal on it yet for example channel 149 by choosing an open channel once again this means that there’s less competition and there’s also less risk for interference which should result in better wi-fi speeds if you don’t want to install a tool that tells you what frequency bands and channels are currently in use you can also just use command prompt it won’t be as pretty but it’ll tell you what’s available in command prompt type in the following command you’ll also find it down below in the description and here i can see all of the different frequency bands and the channels that are currently in use okay so being on the same channel as others is bad but how do you actually change your channel you’ll need access to your router to find out how to get to your router open up command prompt once again and this time type in ipconfig under default gateway you’ll see a set of numbers if you copy these numbers and paste them into your browser that’ll open up the login page for your router if you’ve never logged into your router before look up the type of router you have and then search online for default password and that’ll tell you what the username and password is to your router once you log into your router you should see an option called wireless setup and right here i can see my 2.4 gigahertz signal and here i can choose the channel i have options 1 through 11. if you’re in a different market you might have some additional options now i can set it to auto where my router will attempt to choose the most open channel but if that’s not working well for you you could try different channels out to see how that affects performance down below i see my 5 gigahertz wireless settings and here too i can choose a channel now remember channel 149 was open so that’s likely a good one to choose once i make my changes i can then click on apply tip number four you should use a dns or domain name server that’s going to work harder and also faster for you when i type in the domain name google.com a dns provider takes that domain name and then figures out what the ip address is behind the scenes here for example in command prompt i can type in nslookup google.com and when i hit enter here i can see the ip address for google.com i could copy that ip address and paste it into my browser and that will navigate me to google dns providers do this across all domains on the internet it’s a pretty big job and it’s kind of like maintaining a phone book by default if you’ve never changed this you’re likely using your internet service providers dns servers and they might not be the fastest to see how your current dns provider compares to other options you can download a tool like dns benchmark you’ll find a link up above and also down below in the description once you download the tool click on run benchmark once you get your results you can see how your dns performs compared to other options so here for example when i hover over my current dns it shows that it takes about .023 milliseconds to resolve a cached page if i go to one of the top options i can get that all the way down to .01 milliseconds so less than half the time and hey every millisecond counts to use one of these faster dns options i would recommend changing this within your router that way this will affect all of your different devices on your network back within your router you should find a setting called domain name server and here you can take the specific ip address from the benchmark tool and then you can enter that directly into your router you can enter a primary dns server and you can also enter a secondary now you can also modify this directly in windows but once again that’ll only affect that one device and not all of the other devices on your network right click on your start menu and then select network connections here you can choose the network adapter where you would like to change the dns i’ll click on wi-fi next click on hardware properties and here next to domain name server i’ll click on edit i’ll set it from auto to manual then i’ll toggle on ipv4 and here now i can enter in the ip addresses and tip number five turn off apps that are using your internet connection once again on windows right click on your start menu and then select network connections here click on advanced and then click on data usage and here you can see all of the different apps that are using your internet connection here i see that onedrive is consuming a big part of my internet connection now let’s say maybe i want to play a game and i don’t want onedrive interfering with my data usage here i could right click on the onedrive icon and i could pause syncing so this way i can ensure that it won’t interfere with my gameplay and tip number six this is a bonus tip if you need the best possible performance you should just forget about wi-fi and use a wired connection a wired connection will always perform the best here for example i ran a speed test across my wired my five gigahertz and my 2.4 gigahertz networks and the wired network always performed the best i had the lowest pings and i consistently had fast download and upload speeds now five gigahertz was close but the pings took a little bit longer plus you always run the risk of potential interference or hey maybe a new neighbor moves into the neighborhood and they decide to use the exact same channel that you’re currently on alright well now that we ran through all the tips feel free to run another speed test to see what type of improvement you get and i’d love to hear how much faster your wi-fi is now down below in the comments to watch more videos like this one please consider subscribing and i’ll see you in the next video [Music] [Music] you