How to speed up your home Internet and Wi-Fi on the cheap

I doubled our home Wi-Fi performance and saved hundreds.

- GORDON MAH UNG

You can speed up your home Internet connection and Wi-Fi for cheaper than you’d think. It’s a need many homes are facing now, when the pandemic traps both students and parents under one roof, all trying to work online at the same time.

Wi-Fi range becomes an especially painful issue. In our tiny home, spreading out meant we needed solid signal even in corners of the house, deck, or yard that never mattered before. While an Internet drop-out while surfing the web was no big deal a year ago, a drop-out during a Zoom call is about as embarrassing today as showing up to work with your shirt on inside-out.

Here’s how I sped up our home Wi-Fi and even coaxed more speed out of our main Internet connection (with an assist from our ISP). It takes some smart shopping and DIY can-do spirit, but my cash outlay was minimal—and could have been less, if I’d known everything I know now.

MESH ROUTER (ASUS AIMESH) TO THE RESCUE

When our current troubles first hit, my first step to improve our Wi-Fi was to purchase a used Asus RT-1900P Wi-Fi router. One of the cooler features of Asus routers has been support for a feature called “AiMesh” (go.pcworld.com/ aims). This is basically the company’s take on node-based mesh routers (go.pcworld.com/ mshr) that you place around your home to fix wireless dead zones.