To get the most out of your internet, keep a watch out for these wifi bottlenecks.

Your house wifi is your link to the internet, which is, in turn, your access to the rest of the world. With internet companies charging what they do these days, you want fast and consistent speeds so you can watch 4K streaming or play games online with your buddies. However, there are several obstacles in your house that might prevent your wifi from operating well.


How does wifi interact with your environment?

It's necessary to grasp what wifi is in order to comprehend how particular items and materials block and decrease wifi. To put it another way, wifi isn't the internet: Rather, radio waves connect your gadgets to your router, which connects you to the internet.

Radio waves, like wifi, have the ability to flow through solid things. WiFi would not be an effective or efficient means to connect to the internet if this were not the case. If wifi were light, it would be bright and enlightening until it touched a solid surface—anything after the surface would be dark, despite the fact that we know you can connect to wifi from another room in your house.

Although wifi may flow through physical objects and reach your devices, it will not be at full strength. When wifi encounters an interference, the signal weakens. Depending on what it impacts, the consequences might be little or significant. That's the difference between getting stated internet speeds and getting sluggish, low-quality connections.


It's possible that your home is blocking the route.

If your internet connections are slow, it's possible that your home is to fault. If your wifi signal is attempting to reach you via concrete walls and floors, steel studs, or other heavy things, it will struggle to achieve its full capacity. Wifi and metal don't mix well, so any metal in your walls or floors might obstruct or damage the signal's ability to reach you.

Wood and drywall, on the other hand, aren't especially good at blocking wifi signals, making them excellent for disseminating a signal across a home. If you're receiving good wifi speeds even while your router is concealed in another room or behind a closet, it's probably because it's having no trouble passing through those materials.

Of course, no one constructs a home with the intention of maximizing internet speeds. In this case, you must live with the cards you've been dealt: You won't be able to do anything about it if your walls are made of metal or your house is made of concrete or cinderblock. That's why router positioning is crucial: the less obstacles between your devices and your router, the better.

Wi-Fi isn't always compatible with appliances.

While most gadgets are compatible with wifi (after all, anything that connects to wifi is an electronic), some are outright wifi killers. Consider the kitchen, which is not only a common place for people to use the internet, but is also frequently located near or immediately connected to other internet-heavy areas. The kitchen appliances, such as your dishwasher, refrigerator, and oven, are huge, metal boxes that interfere with your wifi signal. Not to mention the microwave, which, in addition to being a solid metal box, generates its own interfering waves.

Other equipment, such as washing machines and dryers, which may be found in numerous places of your home (even the kitchen! ), might have a negative influence. It's possible that your signal is having trouble getting to you since it's passing through these rooms.

Consider the thin metal barriers in your home.


Two major offenders you may not be aware of? Mirrors and televisions. Your flat-screen TV is actually a thin metal sheet, ready to block your wifi signal from surrounding objects. It's easy to see how using a gaming console or a smart gadget to connect to the internet from your TV may be troublesome.

Mirrors aren't much better. They're also metallic, which might interfere with your signal. I have a mirror right next to my television, which I'm thinking of moving

It's possible that outdated technology is getting in the way.

This is a long shot, but who knows, it could apply to you. While contemporary technology is meant to avoid interfering with your wifi connections, older technology was not as forward-thinking. Bluetooth gadgets from the past, in particular, can interfere with your wifi and place a burden on the signal's reliability. Consider relocating any old Bluetooth gadgets in your living room away from anything you're attempting to utilize the internet with.

What you can do to keep your house wifi from being blocked

You're probably wondering how you might better matters now that you're aware of the objects in your home that could be obstructing or otherwise affecting your wifi connections. We've spoken about how to improve the speed and performance of your router since there are a lot of procedures and tactics that may help you improve your wifi.

However, there is one advice I hope you take away from this post above all others: Place your router in a well-lit area. While not everything in your home will significantly reduce your wifi signal, the best thing you can do is remove any and all impediments between your router and your gadgets. The best course of action here is to place your router in as much open space as possible.

Not every arrangement is the same: While some of us have the freedom to install a router on a coffee table in our living rooms, others are confined to the location of their internet access point. Mine, for example, is permanently installed in my bedroom closet, so there's not much I can do about it except add an ethernet connection throughout my house (now there's a great weekend project idea).

My old apartment, on the other hand, had the access point in the living room, which allowed me to set the router in a more open position. Because there was nothing in the way, connecting to the internet from the living room or even the kitchen was a breeze. When dealing with your own internet installations, if you have the capacity, follow this concept.