There are many many more devices connected at work than at home.
In: Technology
If you search “change wifi channel” on YouTube, it’ll show you how to have wifi not drop all the time.
Because WiFi at work is set up by professionals to work stably with many users and higher quality equipment in a carefully planned network of many access points that cooperate with each other across the whole building, and WiFi at home is a free-for-all battle royale with your neighbors with everyone using cheap consumer routers that fall over at the first sign of trouble and just step all over each other’s signals.
*If* you can solve the problem of fighting your neighbors, then it is perfectly possible to get good WiFi at home, if you spend some money on it. If you have a lot of neighbors, then that probably means switching to the 5GHz frequency band. In the old/default 2.4GHz frequency band, there are only 3 channels to choose from that don’t interfere with each other, so as soon as you have more than 2 neighbors, you’re going to be in trouble. In the 5GHz band there are dozens of channels to choose from, so you have a much better chance of being able to find one or more unused ones and set up a stable network. This takes some investigation into what your environment is like.
Then you need to buy one or more good quality access points, depending on how big a house you need to cover. 5GHz doesn’t go through walls very well, so you might need one every second room, and/or one for every floor, depending on layout. And then, if you have more than one, they should probably be set up with a special controller server to make them work with each other and coordinate so that your devices can smoothly switch between them and pick the best one. And you need to pick the channels so they don’t overlap within your home. And then to make sure your router isn’t a problem either, you might want to upgrade that.
Now you might end up spending $1k on this and having to learn a lot about WiFi and networks, and this is why it takes a professional to pull it off for an office 🙂
That said, cheap consumer routers aren’t *all* terrible, so plenty of people who haven’t done anything special have pretty good WiFi, if their neighbors aren’t causing trouble and their router is decent enough and doesn’t have to cover a large area.
(I do use a single pro grade WiFi access point in my small apartment, with a decent quality router, having worked out channels that are free and configured everything carefully, and it all works very reliably)
As well as all the other answers given so far, interference. At home you likely have many neighbours each with their own wifi and you will likely be stepping on each others’ frequencies. If your work WiFi is physically separated by other homes or businesses who may be running their own by a large physical distance then there’s going to be a lot less interference to ruin it.
The work routers are usually high end devices capable of handling the amount of bandwidth passing through it. Home devices are usually smaller and built for 3 or 4 devices. Most older routers aren’t capable of handling too much data throughput and die out quickly when various devices are eating up all its available bandwidth with games, streaming videos, and constantly updating websites.
Quick note, it used to happen to me at home a lot, but I had a 18 year old router. I went out and bought a new router and it worked like a charm. No more drops.
They are also using much higher end equipment.
At home, you probably have a consumer grade router, which is a router/switch/firewall/access point all rolled into a single device that cost maybe $100. At work, they are using _multiple_ discrete devices for each one of those functions, and each one of those devices probably costs between $500-$2500. Your home network cost you maybe $200 in equipment, while the work network could easily have cost five figures.
That higher end equipment is much more reliable.
Chances are that you have dedicated IT-staff and equipment at work, while at home you have just youtself and some cheap all in one device that does the work done by a dozen different expensive devices at work.
In most businesses above a certain size WiFi is provided not by the same sort of thing you have at home, but by a dedicated device with only one job: to turn wired LAN into wireless LAN.
In fact unless you have a real small office, there will not just be one such “Access Point” device, but several to provide better overage. If the It team that set them up had enough budget these devices may in fact be places in such a way to have a certain amount of overlap in their coverage so that some service will still remain even when one device stops working for some reason.
Also the people managing It should have set things up so that if there is a sign that something stopped working the way it should, somebody will get notified to fix it hopefully before any users notice.
By contrast the thing you have at home is usually only one small cheap device. If it stops working that will be it and the only dedicated person to notice and fix problems with it is likely going to be yourself.
So instead of several redundant, we’ll managed devices you have one device.
And this device is not some expensive peace of reliable hardware, it is some cheap device that is also forced to do a ton of other jobs: it will be a router, a switch, a DNS server and DHCP server, a firewall and several other functions that in your office hopefully each have their own dedicated box.
This is okay though because at home the worst that could happen is that you may need to turn it off and on again and the only one to be mildly incovneicned by that is yourself and whatever family also uses it.
-In the office actual money is depends on the WiFi keeping working, so more money can justifiably bee spent on it.
your work network doesn’t rely on the free router that comes with your cable subscription
they spend 10x on enterprise grade access points, tied to very expensive enterprise grade switches and routers, tied to a very expensive dedicated internet line, all maintained and supervised by techs and network engineers with expensive certifications
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