Placing it in a corner of the house will result in WiFi leakage and reduced signal in your coverage area. Central location - You will obtain the best WiFi coverage if your router is located centrally in your home or office.Placing it on the floor or on low shelves will impede its ability to provide a strong signal. The height of the router - You should locate your router as high as possible.There are several different aspects of your router’s location that can impact its ability to deliver a good signal throughout your intended coverage area. There are a number of factors that can impact the strength of your network’s WiFi signal. What Factors Can Impact WiFi Signal Strength? What Is a Good WiFi Signal Strength in dBm?ĭo you want to know what is a good signal strength for WiFi in dBm? The following table indicates the minimum signal strengths that you should strive for in order to use your WiFi network for various purposes. For example, Cisco uses 0-100 scale, and Atheros uses 0-60. That said, there are some vendors who use a positive scale. This range roughly corresponds to the dBm scale, which is why the measurements of WiFi signal strength are sometimes used interchangeably. The most typical RSSI range goes from approximately -30 to -100, and the lower the number is, the weaker the signal. What’s interesting about this measurement is the fact that it has no standardized relationship to any particular physical parameter, so it’s up to vendors to provide their own range of RSSI values. WiFi signal strength is also sometimes indicated by the Received Signal Strength Indicator ( RSSI level), which is a measurement that represents the relative quality of a received signal on a device. Noise measured at -10 is greater than that of -40. In the case of noise levels, a value close to zero indicates high levels of noise. On this scale a difference of 3 dBm leads to a halving or doubling of the previous signal’s strength.īackground noise levels that can impact your WiFi performance are also expressed in dBms. The dBm scale is logarithmic rather than linear, which means that the changes between signal strengths do not scale in a smooth and gradual manner. Therefore, a signal of -40 is more powerful than a signal of -80 since -80 is further from 0 and therefore a smaller number. This term stands for decibels relative to a milliwatt and is expressed as a negative number from 0 to -100. The most consistent method of indicating signal strength is with a quantity known as a dBm. Before delving into which signal strengths are appropriate for certain uses of your WiFi network, let’s discuss how WiFi signals strengths are measured. The strength of the WiFi signal throughout the network’s coverage area directly impacts the ability of users to perform various activities in a timely manner. Others you might see are 802.11b which is the slowest standard and 802.11g. Some of the more common ones you will see are 802.11n which is used on the 2.4GHz band and 802.11ac primarily used for 5GHz transmission. There are a number of different varieties of the protocol that are used in WiFi networking.

WiFi signals use the 802.11 networking standards when transmitting data. These are higher than the frequencies used for televisions or cell phones and allow more data to be carried than do the lower frequencies. The radio waves which comprise WiFi signals make use of the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz frequency bands. Conversely, data received from the Internet is converted from binary data into radio waves for distribution to the devices that are using the network. The router decodes radio signals received from the users of the WiFi network and transmits them to the Internet. The wireless network router is the interface between a wired connection to the Internet or other Ethernet network and the wirelessly connected devices. These devices may include computers, mobile phones, tablets or network routers. A WiFi network employs radio waves to establish communication between devices.

Wifi signal strength meter