- Sometimes you'll encounter slow wireless transfer speeds,
and it could be
that you just need to upgrade the wireless adapter
on the laptop or the PC,
and you might be running something like 802.11g.
You may wanna consider upgrading to 802.11n or 802.11ac.
Just make sure that it's gonna be compatible
with whatever wireless access point you're connecting to.
So if you upgrade your wireless adapter
on your laptop or your PC to 802.11ac,
you wanna be sure that the wireless access point
is accepting 802.11ac 5 gigahertz signals.
Slow wireless data transfer rates
can also be caused by interference,
and we talked about the interference.
It could be almost anything electronic,
especially if that device is working
within the same frequency range
as your wireless adapter or your wireless access point,
so smartphones, tablets, laptops,
PCs, other wireless access points,
a neighboring company's wireless access points,
and any other electronic or electrical devices
that work on the 2.4 or 5 gigahertz spectrums.
It could be a microwave.
It could be HVAC equipment.
It could be anything like that.
So you wanna watch for that RFI,
that radio frequency interference,
and one of the things to consider is how you're connecting.
For example, with 802.11n,
you could connect via 2.4 gigahertz or 5 gigahertz,
and if you remember,
our SOHO router that we showed can transmit
on both of those frequencies at the same time
as two separate wireless networks.
What I usually do is I put a 2.4 on the end of the SSID name
for the wireless network
that is transmitting at 802.11n at 2.4 gigahertz.
So that's something to keep in mind.
Also, if you have a lot of other devices
on the 2.4 gigahertz frequency, and that's very common,
then you might want to change it over
and just have your wireless access point broadcast
on 5 gigahertz for 802.11n,
and try to stay away from 802.11g and especially B.
With 802.11ac, you don't have to really worry about that
because that's a 5 gigahertz frequency only.
So another thing to watch for
is interference of different types,
and then which type of 802.11n network you're connecting to.
Then there's also the distance.
The farther away you are from the wireless access point,
the slower your data transfer is gonna be.
That's it, because the radio signals have to pass
around or through walls and doors
and ceilings and floors and everything else,
so the distance is really gonna be the big factor.
I usually like to keep computers
and mobile devices on a LAN indoors.
If they're indoors, I like to keep them
within a hundred feet of the wireless access point.
Once you go beyond a hundred feet, even with 802.11n and AC,
you can get a lot of problems,
so watch out for that distance.
Now outdoors, you can usually double the distance,
but you still do have to watch for how far you go
and the interference as well.
And then finally, throttling and capping.
It's basically the same thing.
It's kinda like your internet service provider
can cap your rate, your data transfer rate.
So you might have an internet connection
that could possibly go as fast as 200 megabits per second.
The potential is there, but they're not gonna give you that
because there's so many people sharing that network,
so they're probably gonna cap you
at something like 30 megabits per second,
or you can pay more to get 50 megabits per second.
So this is throttling the network transfer.
Sometimes it might be throttled up and down
at various times during the day.
It might be throttled down during lunch
and at, say, four o'clock in the afternoon
when people are getting all their work done
before they leave.
So throttling is actually slightly different than capping,
but both are possible on a wireless access point
that a network administrator might want you
to only have a connectivity of 100 megabits per second,
even though your connection could go as fast as 300 or 600
or even one gigabit per second.
Here's one of our SOHO routers,
and this one actually does provide for capping for guests,
and they call it bandwidth control.
And so if we go to the guest network here,
you'll see we have access and bandwidth control,
and you can allow guests access to the local network
and enable the bandwidth control for those guests,
and you can have that at 256 kilobits per second or more,
and you have basically your ingress,
that's inbound communications, and egress, that's outbound.
So if the person on the LAN is trying to go to a website,
they'll download information at 1,024 kilobits per second
and they'll upload their emails at,
say, 256 kilobits per second, so ingress and egress.
That's bandwidth control, so that's one example of that.
If you're a guest on a wireless access point,
that could be one of the reasons
why you have a lower connection,
a lower data transfer rate than you would normally expect.
So throttling and capping, distance and interference,
gotta watch for all those
when you're troubleshooting slow transfer speeds.
And let's take a look at our AV editor,
and here we are.
Now, we can take a look at our wireless access point
by going down here to the Start button.
Right-click on that and go to Network Connections.
This is Windows 8.1 by the way, and we'll right-click
on our wifi connection and go to Status.
This is where you can go
to quickly find a lot of information about your connection.
Now you can see the signal quality here, full bars,
full five bars, so we're good with that,
and it should be because it's an 802.11ac connection
and it's about eight feet from the SOHO router
with the wireless access point,
so it should have good connectivity.
The speed is at 288 megabits per second,
so we're pretty much maxing out
at 300 megabits per second for this connection,
and this is indeed an 802.11ac connection.
You might see this speed also for 802.11n connections.
You might see faster speeds than this for 802.11ac,
but when you start to...
If you have an N or an AC connection
and you start to see speeds of, say, 50 megabits per second
or 20 megabits per second in comparison,
you'll probably also see
that the signal quality has degraded.
The two usually go hand in hand.
It might not be, but generally that's the case.
So you wanna check all those things that I mentioned
and look in here at the wifi status
and see exactly how your connectivity is doing.
You can also get here by bringing up the taskbar here,
and you'll see the wireless network here.
We can click on that,
and that'll bring up your wireless connections here.
Could also right-click on that
and go to Open Network and Sharing Center,
and from here, you could go to your wifi connections
or change your adapter settings,
which is where we went from the Start button.
I like the Start button for that reason.
It works pretty well.
You have lots of features here
when you right-click the Start button in Windows 8.1,
a lot of the ones that I use very often.
I like how this is designed by default.
You can modify this
with third-party applications if you want
and modify this within Windows to show more items,
but I like the defaults here:
the Run prompt, Control Panel, Task Manager,
Command Prompt as admin,
Computer Management, and that Network Connections,
'cause you're gonna go there a lot
for your network connectivity
to check the status of a connection,
to enable or disable that wifi connection,
and then to go to Properties
and check the IP Version 4 or IP Version 6 configuration.
So that's a nice little setup there in Windows 8.1.
And so remember how to get to the status window
for the exam and for the field for your wifi connections
and for your LAN connections,
'cause you can troubleshoot from here as well.
And if you do have a problem with your speed,
you can try to diagnose it
and use the built-in troubleshooting tool
within the Control Panel.
You may have some luck with that, you may not,
but if you remember all of the things
that we talked about with network troubleshooting
within this course, you should be able to fix these problems
and fix anything that is caused by distance
or interference or the wrong network type
or a problem with the wireless access point
or this wireless adapter.