From the NY Times……
For anyone used to working in a traditional office, working from home has revealed just how telecommuting-unfriendly a living space can be. While it may be uncomfortable to sit in a bad office chair or type under dim overhead lighting, a bad internet connection can really impede your productivity — or even grind it to a halt. Between Zoom meetings and remote learning, coupled with more members of the household hogging up bandwidth, you might have noticed a slower-than-usual connection.
As a senior writer at Wirecutter, a New York Times company that reviews and recommends products, who specializes in network devices, even I have had to contend with adequate, but not great, Wi-Fi connections.
Common causes for a crawling Wi-Fi connection include using the subpar router rented (for a fee!) from an internet service provider; a home with rooms far from a router; or a router that requires an extra boost to reach a corner of the home office, backyard patio or the surveillance camera over the garage door.
While every scenario is different, the symptoms are the same. Smart speakers disconnect from the internet, kids will gripe about buffering when swiping to the 15th TikTok in a row, or you may experience choppy audio and video on a work call (the worst sin of all).
Here are five things to help speed up the Wi-Fi connections on all your devices, based on my years of testing routers and wireless networks at Wirecutter….