Some things in this life are simply unavoidable. Like going on a trip to Las Vegas and getting married lost fart, having a bald man in a family of werewolves, or being called to be part of a popular jury. Although the worst of all is possibly having a neighbor with such a strong Wi-Fi signal that it renders your home’s own wireless network useless .
The truth is that managing WiFi connections can be frustrating on many occasions. Especially when you are convinced that the neighbor’s signal reaches you better than your own.
My neighbor’s WiFi is too powerful: can I block it somehow?
Of course! All we have to do is talk to the neighbor, see which are the walls that the 2 houses share, and fill those walls to the top with cement. Or better yet, identify those walls and hang a bunch of mirrors on them ( note: mirrors are a great source of EMI ).
Joking (or not) aside, there are many construction materials that can hinder the free movement of WiFi signals. Something that would be interesting to consider if in the future we decide to remodel our apartment or change house. We could also choose to paint the walls with anti-wifi paint (yes, it exists!), Although the truth is, this last method seems more a scam than anything else. We could even turn our floor into a gigantic Faraday box ! But maybe there we are already exceeding the limits of sanity …
If we are looking for a realistic solution to block the neighbor’s WiFi, as it is affecting the speed and availability of our wireless signal, we can try the following.
Install a free app that scans the WiFi signals around you
If we think that the neighbor’s WiFi signal is causing us problems, the first thing we have to do is check it. To do this, we can install an app like WiFi Analyzer , with which we can measure the power of all WiFi networks that reach our house.
This app lets you know which are the most saturated channels and the power of each of the signals.
In many cases, it is likely that, when checking the strength of the neighbor’s Wi-Fi, we will realize that their signal is weaker than ours. It would be somewhat understandable considering that we are at the limits of its range.
Unless, yes, our neighbor has installed an Access Point or a WiFi repeater on a shared wall. In which case, we will have reason to be notably pissed off.
Talk to your neighbor
If we have no choice, we can knock on our dear neighbor’s door and try to talk to him.
- If you have such a strong signal that it reaches our apartment, it means that your home has more than enough Wi-Fi coverage. We can ask you, please, to check the configuration of your router, and to regulate the transmission power(it is an adjustment that we can find in the configuration panel of some routers under the heading ” Transmit Power “).
The “transmit power” option usually appears within the wireless settings.
- We can also kindly ask you to move the router to a more central room. Depending on the configuration of your wiring this may be a more or less feasible possibility. If we also tell you that doing this will make your Wi-Fi signal reach all the corners of your house with the same power, you may take it willingly.
- If the neighbor rejects these 2 solutions, we can always ask him for a favor that will not cost much: change the broadcast channel. In this way, we can configure our Wi-Fi through another channel so that your router does not interfere with ours. It would be the ideal solution, and it would help both your signal and ours to coexist in peace and harmony.
The channel is usually on “automatic”. From the wireless settings of the router we can change it and leave a fixed channel.
Make changes to your router configuration
If the neighbor refuses or simply does not know how to do all that we are asking of him, we can always “apply the story” to ourselves . That is, let’s find a new room for our router so that it can work with less interference.
Together we can also use the Wi-Fi Analyzer app to see which channels are free and pass our signal to one of those channels. Of course we can also try to increase the power of transmission of the signal of our router and try to overcome the signal of our dear neighbor.
Swap Wi-Fi for Ethernet connections
If you see that this is a problem that has a difficult solution or that it will take a while to solve it, ask yourself the following: What if we use wired connections? It is clear that Wi-Fi is practical and convenient at extreme levels, but if we want to avoid signal interference there is nothing better than a good cable connected directly to the router (or a repeater).
For a few euros you can get Ethernet cables of up to 10 meters or more (take a look at Amazon.com or Amazon.com ) and thus make sure that you are connected to the Internet taking advantage of all the bandwidth you have contracted. It is clear that we cannot have all the home devices connected by cable to the router, but if you need to work with the laptop for a few days or the Smart TV does not connect correctly to Netflix, this is a solution that can fix the problem. A bit bulky but very old-school and efficient like few others.
Upgrade your router to Wi-Fi 6
Most routers use the 802.11ac protocol, or what is the same, Wi-Fi 5. The new wireless 802.11ax (Wi-Fi 6) system is still not so popular, but there are already many routers that emit signal wifi using this new technology. And how can our neighbor problem solve this?
Well, very simple, the new Wi-Fi 6 can offer a performance 4 times higher than Wi-Fi ac, and it is also capable of managing internal traffic much better. In this way we will not only get a stronger signal but it will also be more stable. Transfer speeds can also be as high as 10x since the signal is emitted by combining the spectrum of both the 2.4GHz band and the 5GHz band simultaneously.
In the tests I have carried out with one of these routers, the results have been quite satisfactory (not as much as one might expect, but there is a marked improvement compared to routers with Wi-Fi 5).
Image: TP-Link
The best defense is a good offense
If none of this solves our problems, we can always choose to turn the tables and fight back. Buy a few WiFi repeaters (I use the TP-Link N300 and it works great for me) and amplify the power of your WiFi in such a way that it is your neighbors who have to deal with you.
Another way out may be to configure as many devices as possible through 5G (if we have a router that broadcasts on both 2.4G / 5G bands) and pray that the neighbor is not using the same broadcast channel. If the right conditions are met, we can obtain very good speeds and connectivity.
And of course, if we find ourselves in a really extreme situation, we will always have the option of carrying out works at home to increase the thickness of the walls and for external signals to penetrate in a much more attenuated way. But of course, here we would already be talking about a significant outlay of money.
In short, it is best to talk to your neighbor and negotiate WiFi relay channels. If we also accompany it with a WiFi amplifier or repeater.
