Even after you have paid for a high-speed internet package, your movies still buffer, your video calls freeze, and file downloads crawl at an extremely slow rate. All of this can be very annoying, and the first instinct is usually to blame your ISP for all of this, but sometimes, your ISP is providing you with the speed it promised, and the real problem lies inside your home.
Sometimes, when your router isn’t properly configured through the router admin panel, you can experience slow internet speeds and poor performance. Hidden inside the router admin panel are powerful settings with the help of which you can improve internet speeds. Let us take a look at how you can fix slow internet speeds through the router admin panel.
Accessing the Router Admin Panel
The first step is to log into your router’s admin panel or the Web GUI by accessing the webpage through a router IP address. You can log in using a username and password, which in most cases can be found on a sticker on the back of the router. Once you are logged into the admin panel of the router, you can move on to configure other settings to improve internet speeds on the network.
1. Optimize Wi-Fi Channels
Start by optimizing the WiFi channels for your router. WiFi interference is one of the most overlooked causes of slow internet because no one pays much heed to it. Routers are configured to select WiFi channels automatically, but if too many devices or WiFi routers in your proximity are using the same WiFi channel, your connection can suffer and hence slow speeds.
Inside the admin panel, you get the option to select a WiFi channel manually to a less crowded channel. For instance, on the 2.4 GHz band, channels 1, 6, and 11 are the most stable, while for the 5 GHz band, there are multiple channels and less chances of interference.
2. Optimize Frequency Bands
While we are at it, you should also set your router to dual-band mode to allow devices to connect to the band that best suits their needs. WiFi routers these days come with dual-band support and transmit WiFi signals using two different frequency bands: 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz.
The 2.4 GHz band has better range but is more prone to interference and has slower speeds than the 5 GHz band, which offers faster speeds, is less prone to interference, but has considerably less range. Make sure that you enable both the frequency bands so that nearby devices can connect to the 5 GHz band while those farther away can connect to the 2.4 GHz band.
3. Control Connected Devices
Controlling the number of connected devices to the network through this address is very important in improving the internet speeds of your WiFi network. Many people don’t realise this, but the number of devices connected to their router can consume bandwidth and slow down the network.
Through the admin panel, you can access the real-time list of connected devices. If you see an unfamiliar device on the list, it probably means that someone is freeloading on your Wi-Fi network, and you can remove them from the network and prevent re-entry by changing your Wi-Fi password and enabling MAC filtering.
4. Enable MU-MIMO Feature
If your WiFi router has the MU-MIMO feature (Multi-User, Multiple Input, Multiple Output), make sure that you enable it from the admin panel. Traditional routers can serve one device at a time, even when multiple devices are connected, while routers with the MU-MIMO feature can handle multiple devices at once and deliver data to them without slowing others down. For homes and offices with multiple devices, this is a particularly useful feature to improve internet speeds.
5. Adjust MTU (Maximum Transmission Unit) Settings
Adjusting the MTU or Maximum Transmission Unit Settings is also important to improve the internet speeds on your network. MTU determines the size of data packets that your router sends over the Internet. If the MTU is too high, packets can break apart, causing retransmissions and slower speeds. Whereas, if the MTU is too low, it can waste efficiency sending smaller packets than necessary.
The ideal MTU size is 1500 bytes for most connections, but it also depends on your ISP. You can either experiment with the MTU size in the admin panel or contact your ISP. Tweaking MTU sounds technical, but it can reduce latency and improve speeds once optimized.
