If you’re having trouble getting adequate Wi-Fi coverage in your house, it may seem logical to increase the transmit power of your Wi-Fi router. Read this first.
Related: Why Does Rebooting Your Router Solve So Many Issues? (and Why You Have to Wait 10 Seconds)
While there is surely a full PhD degree and then some worth of material regarding radio transmission power and all that goes with it to provide, in order to get to the relevant day-to-day things, we’ll keep it brief here.
The transmit power of your Wi-Fi router is analogous to the volume knob on a stereo. Similarly to how sound energy is measured in decibels (dB), Wi-Fi radio energy is measured in decibel milliwatts (dBm).
If your router supports transmit power changes, you may increase the power output by turning the volume up or down on the setup panel.
Manufacturers differ in how transmit power is displayed and adjusted. Depending on the brand and type, it might be named Transmit Power, Transmit Power Control, Tx Power, or something similar.
The adjusting choices are very diverse. Some only have three options: low, medium, and high. Others have a relative power option, allowing you to alter transmit power from 0% to 100%. Others provide an absolute setting matching to the radio’s milliwatt output, commonly called simply mW (not dBm), with whatever range is possible for the hardware, such as0-200 mW.
Turning up the transmission power on your network seems like a very useful hack, doesn’t it? However, the link between a specific Wi-Fi access point’s transmit power and the accompanying user experience is not a 1:1 ratio. More power does not always imply better coverage or speed.
We would even go so far as to say that unless you are a real home network enthusiast or professional fine-tuning a network configuration, you should leave the settings alone or, in some situations, dial them down rather than up.
There are several circumstances when adjusting the power on your network gear to boost transmit power might be beneficial.
And, if your house is isolated from your neighbors by acres (or even miles) of space, feel free to experiment with the settings because you won’t be helping or harming anybody but yourself.
However, for the most majority of individuals, there are several extremely practical reasons to leave the router settings alone.
Your router is strong, but your devices are not.Wi-Fi is a two-way system. Your Wi-Fi router isn’t simply broadcasting a signal into space to be passively picked up, like a radio listening to a distant radio station. It’s sending out a signal and waiting for a response.
In general, the power level between the Wi-Fi router and the clients with which it communicates is asymmetric. Unless the other device is significantly more powerful, the router is far more powerful than the device with which it is attached.There is another access point with equivalent power.
This implies that there will come a time when the client is close enough to the Wi-Fi network to detect the signal but not powerful enough to properly communicate back. This is similar to when you’re using your smartphone in an area with low service and, despite having at least one bar of signal strength, you can’t make a phone call or access the internet. Your phone can “hear” the tower but cannot respond.
If your property is close to other Wi-Fi-enabled residences, whether in densely packed apartments or a neighborhood with small lots, turning up the power may provide a little boost for you at the risk of contaminating the airspace all around your home.
Given that raising transmit power does not always result in a better experience, it’s not worth lowering Wi-Fi quality for all of your neighbors merely to receive a minor performance boost in your home.
There are many better solutions to handle your Wi-Fi issues, which we’ll go through in the next section.
Increasing the wattage, contrary to popular belief, might actually reduce performance. To return to the loudness scenario, suppose you wanted to pipe music throughout your whole home.
You may do this by installing a stereo system with enormous speakers in a single room and then turning up the volume to hear music in every room. However, you’d immediately notice that the sound was distorted and the listening experience wasn’t consistent. You’d want a whole-house audio system with speakers in each room so you can listen to music without distortion.
While transmitting music and broadcasting a Wi-Fi signal aren’t identical in every aspect, the overall concept is. If your house is covered by Wi-Fi from numerous low-power access points, you’ll have a better experience than if you put the power on a single access point all the way up.
Back in the 2000s and early 2010s, when consumer routers were a little rough around the edges, you might have needed to delve behind the hood and modify things.
However, even back then, and even more so now, your router’s software can handle altering the transmit power on its own. Not only that, but with each new generation of the Wi-Fi standard, along with upgraded routers that benefit from protocol upgrades and additions, your router just performs better.
Many contemporary routers, particularly mesh systems like the eero and Google Nest Wi-Fi, don’t even have choices for adjusting transmit power. The system just balances itself in the background.
We won’t berate you if this one doesn’t bother you since, in the broad scheme of things, it’s a tiny matter compared to the others we’ve discussed—but it’s something to think about.
Heat is the enemy of all electronics, and the cooler your laptop, phone, or router can operate, the happier the processors inside will be. A Wi-Fi access point running in a cold and dry basement, for example, will live considerably longer than one placed in the top of an unconditioned room in a garage.
Even though you won’t be able to increase the transmit power past the point where it would outright harm the router (at least with the standard firmware), you can increase it to the point where the router runs hot all the time, resulting in reduced dependability and a shorter lifetime.
If you’re considering increasing the transmit power, it’s probably because you’re dissatisfied with your Wi-Fi performance.
Rather than tampering with the transmission power, we recommend that you first perform some simple Wi-Fi diagnostics and modifications.
Consider shifting your router and avoid these typical Wi-Fi obstructing materials when doing so.
And, while adjusting the transmit power can result in improved coverage (albeit with the compromises stated above), it’s typically a band-aid solution.
If you’re tinkering with an old router to extend its life despite the myriad ways it bothers you, it’s definitely time to update to a new router.
Furthermore, if your home is large or has Wi-Fi hostile construction (such as concrete walls), you might want to consider making that new router a mesh router, such as the economical yet powerful TP-Link Deco X20. Remember, we prefer more coverage at lower power levels over a single point of coverage at maximum transmit power.
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