Improving home Wi-Fi performance for free

mylesillidge

mylesillidge

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Easy ways to improve your Wi-Fi at home for free

South African households can boost their home Wi-Fi speeds without spending thousands of rands on expensive equipment.

Although home broadband speeds in South Africa have increased with the expansion of fibre and improvements in fixed-wireless access, router performance may still be a bottleneck.
 
For someone living in a reinforced concrete building, using the lower 2.4GHz band will be better than 5GHz, since higher frequencies are blocked by solid walls. It also depends on how congested the channels are. Test. Don't assume...
 
Article is general positioning advice for the first bit.

Your router being on auto for channel selection nowadays probably means it's fine.

The 2.4 vs 5GHz saying 5GHz drops off faster keeps missing the fact that it generally is still more usable at lower signal strength, so it's often got a similar usable range.

Most of the time, it's people who are still on 802.11n class stuff or earlier that have wifi problems, pretty much 802.11ac/Wi-Fi 5 is fine for a majority as it adds decent 5GHz support.

I did notice an improvement for myself going 6E with 6GHz support, but that's because I'm in an apartment with lots of other wifi devices.

Another thing is if you have a bunch of iot devices, make a guest network for that if you can, bandwidth on 2.4 is generally split among connected devices, performance goes way down.
 
Tp-link is trash. I've always said it and I will keep saying it.
It's not just about signal strength etc. anymore. The internet, internet threats, home networking and connected devices have moved on and cheap networking equipment, networking hardware with s**t firmware & the "but it does the job" argument doesn't cut it anymore.

It's one thing if you don't have the money, but people who have more than enough to spend on decent equipment yet completely low-ball their router annoy the hell out of me. It's time to move on to an era where good networking hardware, things like solar inverter & backup batteries etc. start becoming part and parcel of a middle + upper class home or apartment's basic utilities.
 
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Yup. TP-Link, Tenda, Cudy + others all Chinese junk.

I haven't worked with consumer gear for five years or so, but Asus, Netgear, and D-Link weren't too bad...

A cheap Mikrotik router without wifi with a ceiling-mounted Ubiquiti AP always provided excellent performance. If that didn't provide enough coverage, it's easy to add another one or five...
 
Defiler said:
Yup. TP-Link, Tenda, Cudy + others all Chinese junk.

I haven't worked with consumer gear for five years or so, but Asus, Netgear, and D-Link weren't too bad...

A cheap Mikrotik router without wifi with a ceiling-mounted Ubiquiti AP always provided excellent performance. If that didn't provide enough coverage, it's easy to add another one or five...
Click to expand...

I'm a Ubiquiti fanboy even though I've only ever owned their Amplifi HD. I still cannot believe that thing only cost me R2.5K back then. It's still ticking along after 6 years and refuses to die on me. Latency and reception on it was so good I could do wireless SteamVR streaming with my Oculus Quest in the back-yard.

Ubiquiti pumped out firmware for this thing for over 7 years.
Now and again I consider replacing it, but purely 'cause I want to convert my network completely to Unifi and move to proper hardware for firewalling and vnets so I can finally get my IoT devices on their own vnet (the Amplifi HD can do it perfectly but it's so much work to set that up, I want something where I can take my router settings with me between devices)
 
Defiler said:
Yup. TP-Link, Tenda, Cudy + others all Chinese junk.

I haven't worked with consumer gear for five years or so, but Asus, Netgear, and D-Link weren't too bad...

A cheap Mikrotik router without wifi with a ceiling-mounted Ubiquiti AP always provided excellent performance. If that didn't provide enough coverage, it's easy to add another one or five...
Click to expand...
Note that tenda has a hard coded password, is model specific, and their "solution" last month was encrypt their firmware (you can still get it on boot if same model). CVE-2026-11405


My cudy switch, 2.5Gbps, just died in the heat wave here in Europe, always ran hot, new Gen is better though. So would say it's check specific product. Switches it's just is it a good switch, they'll just generally chug along.

With tenda, second backdoor (CVE-2020-35391 from 2020), it's at the point that I was considering just buying hardware to run pfsense. Otherwise check your hardware if it can run https://toh.openwrt.org/?view=normal after manufacturer stops supporting it.

I have now moved to a unifi express 7, since I have switches, prosumer, but that's a price segment most won't spend for good hardware.

Would really like it if one could just have easy, pre set up openwrt routers set up, can be Chinese, it's fine, since you could just reflash the firmware. Just has to be cheap so a normal person can use, and prefer dedicated device that's low power as a NUC or something is a lot more (changes once you do home media servers as it's already running anyways).
 
I feel like router selection matters a lot at higher speeds.

My ISP provided a basic Cudy at the start. If I was on 100 or even 200Mbps I don't think I could tell a difference, it covered the whole house fine. 300Mbps near it and 180Mbps far away.

But I was on 500Mbps so upgraded to an ASUS TUF AX5400. 500Mbps in all the adjacent rooms, 300Mbps far away and the 2.4GHz band reached even into the gardens for wifi camera support. Perfect for online gaming, doesn't drop or have any issues.

Now I'm on 1000Mbps and its limits are clearly felt. Can get 830Mbps right next to it, 680Mbps in adjacent rooms, and now there's a new bug that if the router and ONT restart at the same time then the router doesn't see the WAN till that's restarted independently or something.
 
RaptorSA said:
I'm a Ubiquiti fanboy even though I've only ever owned their Amplifi HD. I still cannot believe that thing only cost me R2.5K back then. It's still ticking along after 6 years and refuses to die on me. Latency and reception on it was so good I could do wireless SteamVR streaming with my Oculus Quest in the back-yard.

Ubiquiti pumped out firmware for this thing for over 7 years.
Now and again I consider replacing it, but purely 'cause I want to convert my network completely to Unifi and move to proper hardware for firewalling and vnets so I can finally get my IoT devices on their own vnet (the Amplifi HD can do it perfectly but it's so much work to set that up, I want something where I can take my router settings with me between devices)
Click to expand...

Yeah, Ubiquiti gear is bulletproof and just keeps going! I've been using 3x UniFi AC LRs for about 10 years now, and still get firmware upgrades. I gave my folks my two older UniFi AP-LR 802.11n AP's I got back in 2012 or so, and they are still performing without issue.

I moved into a new place last month and have a couple of dead spots, so I'll be adding a Ubiquiti wifi 7 AP and 10gb mikrotik switch I'll connect with SFP+ to my router pretty soon.

Personally, I love Ubiquiti for their wireless gear, but I prefer Mikrotik for their routers and switches, as their configurations and firewalling options are endless, and it's easy to backup your config and import into a new device.
 
EmmanuelGoldstein said:
Cheap Chinese Junk routers ===> sub-par WiFi performance.
Saffas being cheapskates ====> predictable outcomes
Click to expand...

There's nothing more "fun" than spending most of your Saturday constantly hard resetting and waiting for the cheapest f**ing TP-Link trash someone could dig up somewhere on an online special because they asked you to "just extend" their office wifi router so it can also work in the braai area.

When I see this page open up in a browser I start cutting myself....

1786193615536.png
 
Gordon_R said:
For someone living in a reinforced concrete building, using the lower 2.4GHz band will be better than 5GHz, since higher frequencies are blocked by solid walls. It also depends on how congested the channels are. Test. Don't assume...
Click to expand...
Got a few of those in my house. Ubiquity is laughing all the way to the bank with the amount of APs I needed lol.
 
I use expensive Chinesium at home.
Have a commercial Huawei AP that was rescued from e-waste. Some stupid farker botched the firmware... badly.
Re-flashed boot partitions, and got it into recovery mode after getting all the necessary info from Huawei. I had to create an account for it and put in a request.

Probably the best WiFi AP I have seen, it's heavy, power hungry and extremely feature rich. It looks like a cellphone base station under the plastic cover.
 
EmmanuelGoldstein said:
I use expensive Chinesium at home.
Have a commercial Huawei AP that was rescued from e-waste. Some stupid farker botched the firmware... badly.
Re-flashed boot partitions, and got it into recovery mode after getting all the necessary info from Huawei. I had to create an account for it and put in a request.

Probably the best WiFi AP I have seen, it's heavy, power hungry and extremely feature rich. It looks like a cellphone base station under the plastic cover.
Click to expand...

That's actually pretty baller.
I'm in the "f**k it, just spend more and get what you want without hassle" phase of my life, but a cheap badass DIY project like this always makes me smile.

I still run a bloody NAS with cheap external USB docks, even had to replace the power supply a few weeks ago when it died on me.
I refuse to spend over R12K just on a NAS, and that bloody agent @My_King won the Synology NAS a few months ago when it should gone to a cheapskate like me.
 
RaptorSA said:
That's actually pretty baller.
I'm in the "f**k it, just spend more and get what you want without hassle" phase of my life, but a cheap badass DIY project like this always makes me smile.

I still run a bloody NAS with cheap external USB docks, even had to replace the power supply a few weeks ago when it died on me.
I refuse to spend over R12K just on a NAS, and that bloody agent @My_King won the Synology NAS a few months ago when it should gone to a cheapskate like me.
Click to expand...
I don't spend a lot of money anymore, because I take great pleasure in repairing that which gets thrown away.
 
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