How to fix your Wi-Fi network

Wi-Fi is everywhere and built into everything. It’s like oxygen for Internet access, media streaming, gaming, and all types of networking. And it should just work all the time—right? If you’ve had an average experience with Wi-Fi on mobile devices, laptops, game systems, and more, you know that while a solid Wi-Fi connection might be the norm, those times when it’s not can leave you tearing your hair out.

Here, I look at a number of common scenarios that cause Wi-Fi problems and how to solve them, whether you’re running your own network or trying to connect to someone else’s using any platform.

WI-FI BASICS

Before we get started, a very quick primer on a few Wi-Fi terms I’ll bring up repeatedly.

802.11: the name of the IEEE engineering trade group’s working group for wireless local area networks (WLANs). WLANs began in earnest with 802.11b in 1999 (802.11a came out at the same time, but had less traction), and the group is all the way up to 802.11ac and 802.11ad today. We expect to see 802.11ax gear announced at CES. These specs define how data is encoded into radio transmissions and exchanged among devices.

Wi-Fi: a trademarked name used to cover network adapters that have passed a certification test to work with each other using various 802.11 specifications.

Wi-Fi networks use two unlicensed frequency bands: 2.4 gigahertz (GHz) and 5GHz. Many Wi-Fi routers and most modern mobile and desktop devices can create networks or connect over either band—these are “dual-band” base stations or adapters. 802.11b and g exclusively use