Wi-Fi Configuration
You sign your lease agreement, you walk in the front door, and Frontier has their little combo router sitting at your front door ready to go. You unbox it, follow the instructions, sign in to your SSID and you’re good to go, right? Right?
To be fair, it could be. You might notice some issues, and you might not. Depending on your situation, let’s say, small home with nothing around and no one prying in, you’re likely good to go! Awesome. But size up in house or be in a tight apartment building with a thousand neighbors all with their own broadcast and… not so happy. Knowing how to configure your Wi-Fi solution for your environment is everything in more complicated scenarios, so let’s walk through the basics.
Service Set Identifiers and Wi-Fi Security
When you take your router out of its box, you’ll first notice a label that’ll have a few details on it, mainly your Service Set Identifier(s) (or SSIDs) and Password. It’ll say something like “MySpectrumWiFi84-5G” and “philosophicalsquib888”. Those are your SSID and password, and they’ll need to be changed at a bare minimum. As a best practice, you should make your wireless SSID use WPA2 for validation, and you’ll want the password you choose to be as difficult to guess as possible.
I’ll be writing more as I go along with the blog, but I’ll go ahead and share my personal favorite method, which I’ll also expound more on in later months and posts, and that’s the Hidden SSID QR Code. The best way to prevent unwanted access to your network is to physically limit access. So, I make my SSIDs as long and complex as possible, and my passwords as long and complex as possible, and then hide my SSID so that any attacker would have to go through the trouble of breaking two passwords. Then I encode my networks credentials in a QR code so that people wanting access to my network must have access to a private area of my house (say upstairs, or in the kitchen).
Now, that’s my method, and I said a lot there that I could do to expound on, and I will. But for now, if you’re a user who knows what they’re doing, you can take that to the bank as an extremely safe method for Wi-Fi access security.
More Than One Access Point
Now, if you live in a complex environment, that is to say, maybe a two story house, a longer house, etc., you’ll likely want more than one access point (or AP) for your network, just so you can cover all the areas you need to serve in signal. This sounds like it may be a real undertaking, but it’s easier than you’d think.
JJackson Tech uses all Ubiquiti hardware (as of 2023), so if I were to recommend any single AP, it’d be the Access Point U6 Lite. It’s small, compact, ready for Wi-Fi 6, can be mounted on ceiling or wall or just left on a desk (though I wouldn’t recommend that) and is just excellent performance for the price, especially since it can be locally configured through UniFi app.
All you would need to do is physically connect the device to your network via ethernet cable and power or PoE, disable your router’s Wi-Fi broadcast, and configure your AP through UniFi. In terms of advanced Wi-Fi solutions, it couldn’t be easier. So long as you attach your APs to the same network and give them the same SSIDs and password, then as you walk through your area, your phone will drift between them as needed to stay on the network.
Configuring Your APs
I’m discovering a lot of future blog posts as I go about writing this one, and this section will bring up at least 3 or 4. In short, your Wi-Fi signal is made of four variables. Power, Channel, Band, and Credentials.
Power is exactly what it sounds like - the amount of power your antenna utilizes to talk. Every AP is different in these terms, but there are a few universal terms. Your AP’s “power” is read as the strength in dB (decibels) that a receiving device hears. A good tool to use is Ubiquiti’s WiFiMan application, which uses your phone’s Wi-Fi antenna to listen in on a variety of networks. Super useful, and it’s free! But when you open WiFiMan, select wireless and you’ll see what I mean. The chart will display all visible networks, with the x-axis representing channel (we’ll get to that later), and the y-axis representing power, in dB.
As a rule of thumb, you want your dB to be as high as possible. -30dB is fantastic, and -90dB is practically unusable. So, as you go around your house place, make your decisions on where to place your APs so that all of your devices get good service, and your most critical or most demanding Wi-Fi devices get the best coverage, again, higher the better in terms of power.
Power isn’t everything, however. Previously I said that living in a crowded apartment building can be a challenge. The reason why, is channeling. For 2.4GHz Wi-Fi (don’t worry, we’re getting to bands), there are 14 available channels, and for 5GHz Wi-Fi there are many more, and most of them are illegal. Either band or channel you pick is important, as it essentially tells your phone what to pay attention to. The best way I can describe it is this: imagine you’re in the road, I mean an interstate. You’re right in the middle of I-4 trying to determine whether or not the cars coming are going to hit you. Now every lane, is a channel. If you’re in lane one, and so is that truck, you’re in trouble. If you’re in lane two, still risky. If you’re in lane three though, you’re pretty comfortable. If you’re in lane four, you don’t even care. Wi-Fi works somewhat like that. If you’re setting up your APs, pay attention to what channel they occupy. Each AP, ideally, should occupy it’s own channel, and not share a channel with any other broadcasting device. You don’t want two devices on your network both screaming in the same room in the same language.
Now we’re on to bands, and this gets a bit easier. Wi-Fi bands are the configured frequency for a Wi-Fi signal. So when someone says 2.4GHz, you can know “a wave that crests 2.4x times per second”. When someone says 5GHz, you can know “5x times per second”, and just knowing that will take you really far. Simply, 2.4GHz Wi-Fi is a really fat, slow band that will slam through walls and people and windows and everything and still carry on for a while. It’s big and hard to stop. 5GHz on the other hand is faster but weaker. So on 5GHz, you’ll get better speed, but you may need more APs. On 2.4GHz, you sacrifice a lot of speed, but you may get a lot more mileage out of your device.
Of course, the new 6GHz band is currently being used in Wi-Fi 6E, but most people aren’t using it, so I’m just focusing on what’s normal right now. The same rules apply.
Conclusions
Now that you’ve read this, and I know there’s SO much more to go over and depth to explore with this technology and how it works, you should have a bit more of an idea on how to configure Wi-Fi and do so securely and effectively. Set solid credentials, configure your APs, place your APs in efficient locations, choose your channels, and viola! You’re no longer the guy who just does what his ISP tells him to do. You’re well on your way to becoming a real network tech.
