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Tech News and Commentary
Dave and the team discuss Google’s announcements including more languages for Google Translate, Google Maps getting an immersive view, automatic transcriptions, better picture search, Dollar Partons TikTok musical, tech growth slowing, Caravana firing 2,500 workers, Netflix ads and password sharing crackdown news, a magnitude 5 quake on Mars, an Apple exec quitting over having to return to the office, a Tesla recall, and more.
David in Atlanta, Georgia Listens to the Podcast and on 920AM and asked: “Looking for a way to improve the Wi-Fi in my house. Often my TV set, which is Wi-Fi, loses its signal. And my kids tell me that videos they’re watching on their phones are slow. But I do speedtest.net and get 100-150mbps downloads, so I am confused. I have reset my router, I’ve added an extender to my system, it still doesn’t seem to improve.”
David, there could be multiple causes for what youre seeing.
Rather than bad WiFi you could be paying an ISP who just cant keep up with demand during especially busy times. If you are running your speed tests when you have time, rather than when the issue is happening, then it could be a problem at ISP level during peak times.
Another thing that could be at play is very cheap hardware. Cheap routers are nowhere near as good, as reliable, or as able to handle a heavy load as more expensive routers.
Routers are computers so their processors and RAM can be overwhelmed by heavy usage and very cheap routers often suffer from that problem.
Assuming those are not the cause, then you probably want to set up a mesh system rather than an extender.
You can get popular, consumer mesh systems from Google, Netgear, and Eero. The price will vary quite a bit, Google will be the cheapest at about $100 per access point, while Eeros system quickly crosses well into 4 figure territory.
Regardless of which you pick, theyre all reasonably solid and much,much better than a traditional extender. Your devices will only need to remember one network and the mesh system will take care of giving each device the best signal they can get from the base station best suited to provide it.
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