OK, I’m kind of embarrassed to not know this, but ignorance must be fought.
Our home wi-fi is sort of crappy, so my wife insists that when she is working (at her job) online, nobody else in the house can be online because we would “take up all the wifi” and leave her with a poor connection. Is that actually how that works? Or is it like radio waves, where turning on a radio in one room will have no effect on the reception of radios in other rooms in the house?
There are several aspects to wi-fi.
If bandwidth is low, what your wife describes may be true.
Do you know the Bandwidth?
Does anyone get a strong bandwidth near the wi-fi base?
Most often the issue is she is in a poor location and getting a crap signal from the antenna on the what is wi-fi device.
This can often be solved by adding a repeater/access point near her work area.
If the Wi-Fi directly from the router or Cable Modem or whatever device you might have? Sometimes it is possible to relocate these to a better area without a lot of work.
So step one is identify the problem
Then the next steps can be determined.
Walls is metal in them and glass can cause issues. The wi-fi base should be centrally located, near an outer wall is usually a problem.
There are a few things here. One is that when people talk about their “home wifi” they really mean their internet connection. In most cases, the internet connection is slower then your wifi connection. If you have a DSL or Cable connection, the downstream connection from the internet to you is often 10x faster than the upstream connection. If other users are uploading at the same time, it can use all the available capacity.
The second item is your WiFi connection in home. This is just a radio connection and it is shared among all users. If the connection is marginal, it will be an issue.
Sort of.
It depends on your set up, but it is very much possible for one person to find themselves limited because other people are using the network.
Sometimes it’s just a matter of power - is she getting enough signal and are there other interfering sources? Maybe it would be good to run some wire along/through the walls and connect her computer (or a bridged or meshed router) directly. Other people can then use the wi-fi. Or maybe set up a mesh network to extend the coverage. I’d say maybe avoid wi-fi repeaters - they can extend range but also reduce bandwidth.
Is there sufficient bandwidth? Think water flow. If you need 4 gallons per minute and the water supply is 4.1 gallons per minute, other people using it can have an effect.
The latter isn’t limited to wireless networks but wired tends to allow for more bandwidth than wireless.
“It depends” isn’t a satisfying answer, but it certainly applies.
Many people have Internet connections that far exceed what you would need to do some Zoom or Teams meetings and check email and edit documents.
Because of this, I normally put the blame on the hardware setup in the house. If you can eliminate Internet bandwidth as the culprit (e.g. you have >10mbits/sec or so in both directions), then consider upgrading the wifi setup to a mesh network. These come in sets of two, three, or more devices that work together as a mesh and give much better coverage in a typical home.
For several years I used Eero and was quite happy with them. If possible, use CAT-6 to connect the mesh devices to each other.
Just one of many options, but this kind of configuration let me have awesome network access for a family of video-watching and gaming people while I was working.
The difference between WiFi and a radio broadcast is that, with WiFi, all of the devices are both sending and receiving. By way of analogy, if someone is giving a speech in a large convention hall, then it doesn’t matter how large the audience is; everyone can hear him. But if everyone in the convention hall is trying to talk at once, nobody will be able to understand anyone.
Is this always the most relevant factor? Not necessarily. As others have said, the Internet connection can be more relevant. But it can be a factor.
The difference is that modern Wifi uses techniques like MIMO and OFDMA so that everyone can talk and listen at (virtually) the same time.
Wi-Fi Explained - Band, Channel, MU-MIMO, Beamforming, OFDMA, Mesh (7labs.io)
Tell what sort of connection you’re paying for through your internet provider.
If you’re paying for a paltry amount (my coworker just told me his plan was for 8 mb/s, and AT&T just upgraded him for free to 50mb/s - I can’t imagine getting anything done at either speed), an upgrade to your subscription may be in order.
If your plan is fine, you may need a better Wi-Fi router. Depending on your home, that may be a new mesh system, or it could be an upgrade from your service provider (lots of router boxes are seriously outdated), or just a beefed up Wi-Fi router.
It’s not free, though. You do that by splitting up the band, whereas if it were just one device, it’d be free to use the entire band itself.
@Thing.Fish, to help us answer specifically for your case, it would be useful to know a few things. Are you able to answer any of the following? (Even a partial set of answers would be useful.)
(1) Bring a mobile device into the same room as the main wifi router, of if you aren’t sure where that it, then bring a mobile device into an area where you feel wifi service works best. Go to google.com and search for “speed test” into the Google search bar. Click the “RUN SPEED TEST” button that shows up. This runs for a brief time (less than a minute) and then reports two numbers (download and upload). What are those two speed numbers with their units (probably Mbps)?
(2) Do the same near your wife’s work set up or better, if able, directly with her computer’s web browser. What are the two speed numbers there?
(3) What sort of online services does your wife use during work? Video conferencing? Online document editing? Other things?
(4) What physical internet “black boxes” do you have in your home internet setup? For instance, is it that a cable enters the house, goes into a black box provided by the internet service provider, and that’s it? Or, are there other box(es) either connected to that first box or maybe some sort of “repeaters” plugged in elsewhere in the house?
Before worrying about Wi-Fi, let us talk about bandwidth. If your total download bandwidth is, say, 500 Mb/s, and two people are trying to download something at the same time, you do indeed need to set up some sort of fair queue management so that each one gets her fair share, and moreover high-priority flows are not starved out.
As for your wi-fi itself, it may be worth finding out whether it is indeed “Crappy”. There are different standards— 802.11n will not be as fast as 802.11ax. There are different “channels”, and non-crappy wi-fi will indeed implement some sort of frequency-division multiplexing, and also with the MIMO as described, it’s not like only one person can use it at once or one person using wi-fi will jam everybody else.
Great suggestions, but I would add that you might want to consider a set of power line network adapters. One unit gets wired to the network router/gateway and the other unit is installed at your wife’s computer. This assumes, of course, that your wife’s computer has a network port or an adapter of some sort. They have several advantages: relatively inexpensive, generally good bandwidth, and they would completely remove her from depending on the house’s wifi.
Granted, they generally work best if they are on the same power leg, but they do work pretty well even if they’re not.
Just a thought.
It would be useful if the OP described what else is going on in the house that the wife wants shut off
If her request causes @Thing.Fish to stop browsing the Dope and there’s nothing else going on that’s one scenario where her request is almost certainly superfluous. And therefore if she’s having network trouble, it’s not for lack of total bandwidth; it’s something else.
OTOH if her request causes 3 teens to each stop watching three different vids each on their PC, their tablet, and their phone simultaneously while also making a voice call on the phone that’s also using the Wi-Fi not the cellular network while @Thing.Fish himself is engaged in an FPS game on his PC and a streaming vid on his tablet, well … we’d have a very different situation where wife/Mom almost certainly has a point.
My bottom line: A Wi-Fi based home network setup can support three multitasking teens, a hard core gamer, and somebody WFH on e.g. Zoom and a couple remote desktops. But there’s no guarantee the OP’s is set up well enough for that mission.
And as noted by others above, the speed / bandwidth provided between your modem / network interface box and the outside world internet may be a larger factor than the set-up inside the house between the modem / network interface and all the user(s)’ device(s).
Depending on what work wife is doing, the difference between your ISP’s upload speed / bandwidth and download speed / bandwidth may be a major factor or none at all.
I think first we should explain how things are set up in most places.
First, you’ve got your internet connection. This is how your house/office connects to the internet. In all likelihood, it’s a wired connection, and is either cable, VDSL, or fiber optic. This connection has what’s called ‘bandwidth’, which is a way of saying how much data that can be transferred in any given second. You usually pay for specific bandwidth amounts.
Second, you’ve got your local area network. This is the network that your devices connect to- in your case, it’s wi-fi. This sort of network also has its own bandwidth, and is usually, but not always higher than your internet connection bandwidth.
Third, your local area network connects to your internet connection via your router. If devices on your LAN are talking to each other, that doesn’t go to the internet. If you’ve got multiple users, you’re essentially sharing the bandwith of the internet connection, so it’s possible that if you’ve got a really slow connection or a whole lot of users/devices using a lot of data at once, you may notice slowdowns. We rarely do however- even with a smart TV streaming 4k, two phones, and a PC going at once. Sometimes we do, but it’s rare.
So using my setup as an example, I’ve got a 100 megabit VDSL connection to AT&T as my internet connection. This means that I can receive 100 million bits per second from AT&T. I can also send 20 million per second. My local network is considerably faster than that- I often get 500 megabits from my wi-fi connection on my phone. (it’s 5 ghz 802.11ac TP-Link OneMesh, if anyone cares).
You’re limited in most cases to your internet bandwidth to do anything outside your own local area network. So if I’m streaming video from YouTube to my phone, I can only stream at a maximum of 100 megs. But if I’m streaming from my phone to my TV, I can stream at whatever the fastest common speed of the TV and phone on the local area network is- if they’re both connected at 250 megs or higher, I can stream at 250 megs between them because it’s not going outside of the LAN.
LANs have different transmission methods, so you don’t really share the data in the same sense.
The OP never described any actual slowdown symptoms or provided details about the Internet or Wi-Fi or LAN, so we cannot be sure there is any real problem.
Thanks for all the great answers! I am on vacation this week and will do some of the suggested troubleshooting when I get back. I just didn’t want anyone to think I had bailed on my own thread!
What I will say is that the problem is inconsistent; sometimes the wi-fi works fine, sometimes it doesn’t. I think that moving closer to the modem and/or shutting down competing devices sometimes helps, but it doesn’t help consistently enough that I can feel sure that it does in fact help. Talk to you next week!
These types of problems are extremely difficult to solve, because the issue could be anywhere between the chair and the server someplace off on the Internet that is handling the requests. Different sets of symptoms will change the probability that the problem is in different places in the chain.
Even worse, sometimes it can be a combination of things causing the problem. When the work server is heavily loaded, and the neighborhood cable company is heavily loaded, and someone in the house is streaming, and the wind is blowing the wifi the wrong way, it can all add up to enough to cause timeouts and failures. Fix any one of those things, and everything starts working again.
You can try something simple like walking around with a phone and checking if there are any spots with poor signal strength.