Why does the WiFi seem to rarely go down at work, but go down at home all the time?

Question

There are many many more devices connected at work than at home.

In: Technology

Answer 1

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)