Faster and Better: Getting the Best Home Network Performance
If you have a fabulous Internet plan, count yourself lucky. In parts of our country, it’s not possible to work from home, watch a movie, or play a game that requires Internet connectivity. But what happens if you have a great Internet plan but you still can’t seem to watch a movie without it stuttering and buffering? Well, that’s when you need to look at the stuff inside your house to find out what’s going on. There are things that can take a Ferrari of an Internet plan and turn it into a land tortoise.
Today I’m going to go into why network performance matters, not just your Internet speed. I’ll explain what you should expect from your home network, and then I’ll help you troubleshoot problems. I’ll also talk about how to keep your network running like it ought to. When we’re done, you won’t be a networking expert, but you’ll have the tools you need to get the best performance from your home network. Key phrase here is home network. This information won’t help a business, even a small business on a business plan.
Understanding Normal vs. Abnormal Behavior
“Normal” behavior isn’t easy to define for all networks, because there are a lot of factors, like the service plan, type of equipment, age of equipment, and interference, to name a few. I’ll give you some basic information to get started with, and you can get an idea of what you’re looking at, compared to what your service provider told you that you should expect (the fine print version, not the advertising version).
Typical Home Network Speed and Latency Expectations
For most home networks, download speeds between 25 and 100 Mbps are good enough for basic activities, like casual web browsing and streaming in regular High Definition. When you get into multiple devices doing these activities, especially the streaming, or if you want to do 4k streaming, you’re going to want to see speeds of 100-300 Mbps. In my home, I can watch a movie and two others can do casual web browsing and even watch short videos without problems, and our download speed is 25 Mbps. When my son was living at home, he could play a game and I could watch a movie and one of us would see a bit of stuttering from time to time, but not always.
Upload speeds – sending data to the Internet – are usually slower than download speeds. If you’re going to be making video calls, or doing cloud backups, you really want 5-10 Mbps, but I’m able to do video calls and cloud backups with my 1 Mbps upload speed. I couldn’t do my work uploads of large files, though, so I had to use other means to get those done. Yes, 1 Mbps. I know. It’s awful. And I do my cloud backups at times when we’re not likely to be putting other demands on the network.
Latency is the drag time or lag time – gaps in transfer, or slowness. For gaming and video conferencing, you want latency below 50 ms (using a ping test, which I’ll explain in just a bit). If you get above 100 ms, you’re likely to see delays in transfers.
How to Measure Network Performance
You can start your test using Speedtest, at https://www.speedtest.net or Fast at https://www.fast.com
This is what you’ll see after Fast does its thing (you don’t even need to do anything, it’ll just start) and you click “show more info.”
This is the output of Speedtest, and you do have to select “start” to make it run, but it shows all of this at the end.
There are router management apps that can help you test your internal network speed. If you have a router that is separate from your gateway that the Internet Service Provider (ISP) provides, the router manufacturer will provide that app, but if your router is built into the gateway, your ISP will provide the app.
You’ll want to run the test on different devices if possible, so that you can identify if the speed is consistent across all devices, or if only one device is having issues. You may also want to run it several times on different devices if you don’t get consistent results. You may be seeing a temporary or intermittent problem. It’s also helpful to conduct tests at different times to see if the speeds are affected by other factors like congestion on the external or internal network.
You can also see if there’s a difference between devices using Wi-Fi and devices connected using a cable. Wi-Fi speeds can experience signal loss and may be expected to be a bit slower than cabled connections.
Common Causes of Slowdowns
Where is your router sitting? Is it in a corner, or in a closet? How many obstacles are between the router and the other devices? Does the Wi-Fi signal have to climb the stairs? All of these things can slow the signal down, and any combination will magnify that slowdown.
Too many devices connecting at once can overwhelm the network. It’s going to get worse if the signal coming into your house is susceptible to congestion as well. Not all service plans are susceptible to that, though, because there are different technologies available to deliver Internet service and some don’t have that problem. If you notice that your Internet speed slows down when your kids get home from school, it’s probably due to congestion.
You may also find that certain other devices create interference on your network. If you have microwaves or baby monitors in the path of your Wi-Fi signals, you can definitely see some speed loss.
The age of your equipment is going to play a big part in speed as well. Older routers just can’t keep up with today’s demands, the cables from 20 years ago aren’t able to pass as much data. A few years isn’t old, but ten years is getting up in years.
There are also certain activities on the network that will hog all the bandwidth. These include 4k video streaming, graphics-intensive gaming, and large downloads.
Recognizing When Something’s Wrong
You can usually tell when something’s not working well, especially if you know what “working well” looks like. If you find that it takes fooooooreeeeeeveeeeer to load a simple web page, you might have a problem. If you find a video buffering repeatedly when nobody else is using your network, you might have a problem. If you find your network connections keep dropping, you might have a problem.
It will be helpful if you can recognize patterns. Is there a time of day when you see this? Are you doing something in particular at the same time? Who all is home during the problem time? What are they doing at that time? Is it only one web page or only one activity?
You’re also going to want to determine if you’re having network issues or device issues. Check the activity with both a laptop and a mobile device. Check wired and wireless. Check for old, outdated drivers, incorrect network settings, or power mode settings. If it’s a wireless-only issue, see if moving closer to the router changes things.
Troubleshooting Step-by-Step
You could just “do stuff” to try and fix the problems, but it’s always better to take a methodical approach to troubleshooting. Here are the steps to effective troubleshooting. You can stop when the problem goes away.
The first step is always a reboot. But not just any reboot. Start first with the device that is having the problem. I started my career in IT over 20 years ago, when we were still using Windows 2000, and that was our first step in troubleshooting. It’s still valid.
If that doesn’t resolve the issue, power-cycle the modem/gateway, waiting 30 seconds before plugging it back in, and then power-cycle the router if your router is separate from the modem/gateway. This lets your modem/gateway fully connect before you reboot the router.
The next thing is to continue downstream to any range extenders or mesh nodes. If you’re still having problems after the router comes back up fully, restart all of them.
Once everything comes back up, you may need to reboot other devices if you were only working with one computer or tablet. This will give them all a fresh connection to the router.
This is the order of rebooting: Primary device>>Modem/gateway>>router>>network extenders>>other devices.
Next, check for interference if you’re still not happy with performance. Look first for physical obstructions, like walls, large furniture, floors and ceilings. Your router will blast best if it’s in an open, central location.
Next, identify other electronic things that may be generating signals that can cause interference. Microwaves, cordless phones, and baby monitors are all likely culprits. You want to position your router away from these devices.
Other Wi-Fi networks close to yours might be using the same channel, which will cause congestion. You can use your router’s app or a tool like WiFi Analyzer to see if you can find a less crowded channel to use.
If your router is a dual-band router, use the 5 GHz band. It’s going to be less crowded, and it offers higher speeds over shorter distances than the 2.4 GHz band.
Make sure your router is current on its firmware. Check with the manufacturer’s website to see how to do this, there are way too many to try to give all the instructions here.
If you have a big space with weak areas, consider putting together a mesh network. They’re easy to find and not terribly difficult to set up, but if you buy it from a reputable electronics store, it may be worth paying for installation if you don’t have a go-to geek in your family. Mesh networks can improve coverage and reduce “dead zone” areas.
Preventive Tips to Maintain Strong Performance
You don’t have to wait till you have troubles to make changes to get the best out of your network. There are maintenance activities you can perform periodically to reduce the number and frequency of issues you have. Preventive maintenance is always easier, cheaper, and more effective than troubleshooting and repairing.
Start with scheduling regular router reboots. Try monthly to see if it’s often enough, and set a calendar schedule to remind yourself to do it, if you can’t schedule it in the router itself. I don’t recommend letting many devices manage themselves, because there’s always a chance I’m using something when it wants to reboot. Rebooting the router helps clear its memory, preventing slowdowns caused by too many connections (that may have disconnected but that the router hasn’t let go of) or memory leaks. Every couple of weeks or even weekly may be required, though, if your router gets a lot of connection/disconnection use or heavy use. If you want to automate it, you can plug it into a smart plug and manage the schedule with the smart plug’s app or smart home assistant like Alexa or Google Assistant. You obviously want to do this when it’s unlikely that someone’s using the network, or someone will get upset.
Next, you can monitor the connected devices. The router’s management app can give you a view of all devices connected to your network. If you see something you absolutely cannot identify, you can disconnect those devices. Sometimes televisions and printers have bizarre names, but you’ll know pretty quick if you disconnect something someone’s actively using. The management app may also be able to let you know which devices are hogging the bandwidth, and most routers can give you an alert when a new device joins the network.
Finally, setting your security up right will keep people from stealing your bandwidth. Use a strong password (learn how to make one here) to keep people from sneaking onto your network. This isn’t just about keeping people from using your bandwidth, it’s also about keeping them from seeing into your other devices.
Make sure your router is set to use WPA3 or WPA2, using the highest level of encryption available. Encryption scrambles the data transmission, rendering the contents unreadable by intruders and sniffers.
Use a Guest network for your smart devices and visitors. You can let them use Wi-Fi without letting them see your banking information. Many routers and gateways make this super easy now, but you should be able to find the information at the provider’s or manufacturer’s website.
Your Turn
We rely pretty heavily on our connectivity these days, don’t we? The good news is that you don’t need to be an expert in networking to keep your network “up to speed” so to speak. If this post has been helpful, drop me a comment and let me know. If you have a question about this that I didn’t address, ask me!
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