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How to Prepare Your Wi-Fi for a Self-Quarantine

With a little tinkering, you can make bad Wi-Fi work a little better

Owen Williams
OneZero
Published in
5 min readMar 19, 2020

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Photo by Tayler Smith; Prop Styling by Caroline Dorn

OOffice workers everywhere have been asked to work from home in an effort to slow the spread of coronavirus. And many of them are finding out that the Wi-Fi in their homes isn’t as good as it is at the office. Especially if they live in dense cities, there are dead spots in comfy corners, or constant freeze-ups on video calls.

Even without investing hundreds of dollars in new hardware (which is also an option I’d recommend and wrote about here), you can make your home Wi-Fi a little more reliable. With a little tinkering, even that terrible modem from your internet provider will work a little better.

Do a Speed Test

The first thing you should do is hit a website like speedtest.net or fast.com to test how well (or how poorly) your Wi-Fi is already working. Bring your laptop to problem spots, and where you think you’ll be spending the most time working from home, to do the tests.

Write these numbers down, and run the tests again from a few other spots in your house, noting where the speed really drops. Check the internet package you’re subscribed with to find out what internet speeds it promises, so you…

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Owen Williams
OneZero

Fascinated by how code and design is shaping the world. I write about the why behind tech news. Design Manager in Tech. https://twitter.com/ow