Change Your Wi-Fi Router Channel to Optimize Your Wireless Signal

If you live in an apartment complex you’ve probably noticed more than just the passive-aggressive network IDs that your neighbors use—very likely you’ve had problems with your wireless connections dropping out, or just not being as fast as you’d like. Here’s a quick fix.
Of course, this isn’t the only thing you need to do to make sure your wireless network is running at maximum speed, but for today’s lesson we’ll show you how to pick the right channel to make sure you can stream the new Futurama episode to your laptop without skipping.
Note: if your Wireless network is working fine, please don’t mess with it. Or at least, don’t blame us if you break it.
Figuring Out the Right Wi-Fi Channel
The first thing you need to do is grab yourself a copy of the free inSSIDer utility, which will scan your wireless network and probably reveal some humorous names from your weird neighbors. If only they could learn how to park their cars like decent human beings.

Let’s take a closer look at that window… you’ll need to choose the right channel band, depending on the router you are using. Mine is a Linksys dual-band Wireless-N router, which has two separate networks… if you aren’t sure, go for the 2.4 GHz one first, and then click the Start Scanning button.
Note: If you have more than one network card enabled, make sure the drop-down has your wireless card selected.

Ideally you’ve selected the right one, and after waiting for a minute or two, you’ll see your network in the list. For example, my test network is called lhdevnet, and it’s currently running on channel 6. If you looked closely at the screenshot earlier, you’d see that there are loads of networks in my apartment complex using the same wireless channel.

Looks like it’s time to change the channel. Hopefully Futurama is on.
Change Your Wireless Channel
If you’re using a Linksys router, you’ll need to browse to the address of your router, which is probably set to http://192.168.1.1 but could be assigned to another address. You can run a quick ipconfig command at the command prompt to check:

In my case the address is different (because I changed it, of course), but what you’re looking for is the Default Gateway for your Wireless connection, and then go to http://<Default Gateway> in your browser. Enter in the password that you hopefully remember, and head to the Wireless –> Basic Wireless Settings tab.
My router has two separate bands, but your router might just have a single band here. In my case, what I’ve done is set the 2.4 GHz band to only be used for Wireless-G, and the 5GHz one to Wireless-N only. Since I’m not having any problems with the Wireless-N settings, I’ve left those on auto.

Where I am having a problem, however, is my Wireless-G devices—so what I’ve done is chosen channel 9, since it’s the only channel that’s not being used by any of my neighbors, who are using mostly channels 1 and 6, though a few are using 11 as well.
Channels 1, 6, and 11 are the most common channels to choose, and most routers will use one of them as the default channel—but the general idea is to be as far away from everybody else as you can.

Note: I’ve also configured my router for 20 MHz only on the 2.4 GHz Wireless-G band, just because that was the only way it would let me choose the standard channel manually.
If you are using a different router, the IP address will generally be the same, but you’ll have to figure out how to change the Wireless channel without any screenshot tours. It’s usually fairly easy, though, once you know what you’re looking for.

Fun Technical notes
If you look closely, you’ll notice that each of the channels are 5 MHz away from each other, but the Channel Width for 2.4 GHz is actually 20 MHz. What this means is while that the channel might be set to channel 6, it’s also partially using 5 and 7, and probably slightly interfering with 4 and 8.

Need an instant WiFi hotspot? Here's how

From time to time you might run into a situation where you have a computer connected to the internet (maybe via Ethernet), and you have a device you want to connect to the internet as well, except there is no WiFi hotspot to connect to. I was in a situation like this today, so I simply created a hotspot using a nifty app called Connectify.
As long as your computer is running Windows 7 and connected to the internet via some form, whether that is via WiFi, Ethernet or even a 3G/4G dongle, you can use Connectify to share that same connection through a new WiFi hotspot. It’s really simple to set-up and allows any device to connect via secure WPA2-PSK.
All you need to do is download the application here, install it while making sure your antivirus software doesn’t prohibit the installation (ESET Smart Security, for example, prohibited the service from starting), then run the app. From here you simply need to choose a hotspot name and password, choose the incoming network you want to share and through which WiFi card you have in your computer, then click start hotspot.

It’s even possible to share incoming WiFi out through the same WiFi card, which is awesome for increasing range for when your computer can connect to a WiFi network, but your phone may be out of range. The Pro version of Connectify also allows you to do more things than just create a hotspot, such as repeat the exact same network through your WiFi card rather than having to create a new SSID and password to use.
Performance using the software is also very good. I was able to almost max out my connection’s speeds on my phone, connected through Connectify, with only a slightly longer ping time; I could even watch YouTube on both my computer and phone at the same time if I wanted. It was certainly much faster than through 3G and without a small data cap.
Connectify is a very handy app, and it’s available for free with enough functionality to create instant WiFi hotspots whenever you might need to. Try it out whenever you find yourself annoyingly without WiFi.

credit to: Tim Schiesser