Optimize your router for a stable wireless connection

HOUSE OF SCREAMING RADIOS

Say you're approaching the end of a large download, and in the middle of a Skype call to clients in China, without warning, your Wi-Fi connection drops, leaving your download and VoIP call in limbo. You retry the wireless connection, but your router, though blinking contentedly in your den, seems to be off the air. Two hours later, for no apparent reason, your Wi-Fi connection miraculously resurfaces.

Wireless networking can be a blessing and a curse: great when it works and a mind-numbing frustration when it doesn't. A common complaint among many who have moved to Wi-Fi is that their wireless connection mysteriously fades in and out.

These steps will help you create a stable, always-on wireless connection.

1. Change channels.
Interference is a likely cause of intermittent connections, such as the one described above. All 802.11b and 802.11g networks operate at 2.4GHz, in a small swath of spectrum once used primarily by ham-radio hobbyists. Today, these radios, plus other Wi-Fi gear, Bluetooth devices, cordless phones, microwave ovens, baby monitors, and wireless surveillance equipment, all crowd the spectrum. When these devices compete for the same airspace, they interfere with each other, potentially blocking each other's signals. Luckily, there are ways to sidestep and minimize interference in many situations. In the United States, 802.11b and 802.11g devices can be configured to operate at any one of 11 channels. Unfortunately, these channels overlap with adjacent channels, so you have only 3 nonoverlapping channels at your disposal: channels 1, 6, and 11. If you and your neighbor both have a wireless network, both of which are set to channel 6, you may experience interference. You can remedy the problem by resetting your wireless router to a different, preferably nonoverlapping, channel, in this case, either 1 or 11.

2. Replace your cordless phone.
Cordless phones are among the worst sources of interference for wireless networks. They tend to transmit at a higher power output than Wi-Fi gear, making them louder and therefore harder to talk over, and they tend to transmit frequently, especially when the handset and base station are separated. Some 2.4GHz cordless phones let you select a channel, in which case you can try separating the phone's frequency from the frequency of your wireless network. For example, set your phone to channel 1 and your wireless router to channel 11. If your phone doesn't let you select a channel, try putting some distance between your phone and your router. Generally, it's not a good idea to place a cordless phone next to a Wi-Fi router. If this doesn't help, consider replacing your 2.4GHz phone with a 5GHz phone. This way, your phone and network won't be sharing the same airspace and won't interfere with each other.

3. Expand your wireless network.
The farther you are from your wireless router, the greater the potential for interference to block or to slow your connection. For example, you may be able to connect just fine in your house, but on your patio, you may have an intermittent connection that disappears whenever your neighbor is using her cordless phone. The signal on your patio may be too weak to cope with the interference coming from the house next door. You can strengthen the connection with antennas or repeaters, as discussed in Monday's nightmare, or you can use a power-line bridge to import the connection from your router to your patio and feed it into a power-line access point. Instead of the weak signal from your distant router, you now have a strong signal from an access point placed right where you want to buttress your coverage area.

Wi - Fi Protect

Protect your wireless network from hackers

It would send chills down your spine to learn how easy it is for others to connect to your Wi-Fi network and put your computers under their spell. If your computer has been acting funny lately, working fine at times while slowing to a crawl at others, it may have crossed over to the dark side and could be spamming your friends and scamming your parents.

A home network brings many benefits, but it can also expose new evils. Both your Internet connection and your wireless router are potential points of entry for the bad guys. Hackers can probe for your computers over the Internet and turn them into zombies if they are unprotected. Worms and viruses can slither their way through your network, burrowing more holes into your PC than a maggot-infested corpse, and the thief parked on the street where you live can set up shop with the help of your Wi-Fi connection.

Here are a few tips that will keep hackers and freeloaders at bay.

1. Use encryption to protect your wireless network. It sounds trivial, but consider this: wireless data is transmitted over the air. This makes it far more exposed than data transmitted over a cable. To hack into an Ethernet network, you either need to force entry through an Ethernet connection or you need access to the Ethernet cable, which you can lock behind a door; but to pry into a wireless network, you need only be within range. A would-be intruder can park in the street where you live and do her dirty work from the privacy of her car, without risking the unpleasantries of breaking and entering.
You can protect your wireless network by encrypting it. Virtually all Wi-Fi gear supports an encryption scheme called WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy). WEP scrambles data transmitted over your network, making it difficult to decipher. Even better, setting up WEP is easy. In most cases, you merely enter a passphrase into the configuration settings of each device on your network. The devices use the passphrase to generate a WEP key, which is used to encrypt and decrypt data transmitted over the network.

2. Lock down your LAN. An always-on broadband connection is convenient, but it's also a magnet for hackers and script kiddies, giving them a target that is open 24/7. You can use a firewall to thwart attacks on your network that use your Internet connection as their point of entry. Most wireless routers come with an integrated NAT firewall. NAT stands for network address translation and is used to hide the IP addresses of the PCs on your network behind your router's IP address. From the Internet, your network appears to consist of only one device, your router. This makes it more difficult for intruders to identify the computers on your network. NAT, however, is relatively dumb. It maps the addresses of the computers on your network to the IP address of the router, but it doesn't inspect the data inside the packets passing through your router. For that, you need a second firewall that performs stateful packet inspection, or SPI. An SPI firewall can determine if an incoming data packet is a legitimate response to a request from one of your computers. Not all routers include an SPI firewall, so keep a lookout for it when you buy your gear.

3. Don't make it easy for criminals. Most consumer networking gear is designed to be easy to use out of the box. Easy setup might leave you with a warm fuzzy feeling after the initial setup, but a foolproof setup routine can also leave your network vulnerable to unwanted visitors. For example, routers use DHCP, dynamic host configuration protocol, to automatically handle the IP address information for the computers on your network. But handing out IP address information automatically makes it easy for unwanted guests to join your network. Consider manually assigning static IP addresses to your computers and turning off your router's DHCP server. To manually configure an IP address, right-click the Network Neighborhood icon and select Properties. A window appears listing your network adapters. Right-click the adapter you use to connect to your LAN and select Properties. In the "Local area connection properties" window that appears, select Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) and click the button marked Properties. This window allows you to use a prespecified IP address, subnet mask, default gateway (in this case, your router), and DNS server. Check Wednesday's nightmare for more information about assigning IP address information.

If you have a wireless router, it probably advertises its network name, or SSID, at regular intervals to any device within range, making it easy for others to join your wireless network. Some routers let you turn off the beacon that puts your SSID on the air for everyone to see. Since your computers presumably already know your wireless network's SSID and have profiles instructing them to use it for their connection, consider turning off your router's beacon. Though not all routers let you turn the beacon off, many do. Check the router's browser-based configuration tool for a beacon switch.