Selecting and Installing a WiFi Booster

A wireless booster, also known as a WiFi extender or WiFi amplifier, is an electronic device similar to your home or office router. Its job is to receive a wireless signal, amplify it, and broadcast it again. Out of these, the amplification phase is the most important.

Desktop computers, laptops, and mobile devices have tiny wireless chips with built-in antennas. In most situations, they do a good job, but they become inadequate as soon as you move farther away from the wireless signal source. In comparison, a wireless signal booster has two large antennas — one for receiving and one for broadcasting — which can be either built-in or external.

The signal amplification electronic circuit works like a microphone, making weak signal strong.

A wireless booster can be used to strengthen an existing WiFi network and bring strong internet signal to all corners of a house or an office. You simply connect a WiFi booster to your network — just like you would a smartphone — and it will automatically start broadcasting. Most wireless signal boosters on the market are designed to be easily extendable.

Let’s say that you would like a rock solid internet connecting in every room in your house, including the basement and the attic. The chances are that a single wireless signal booster wouldn’t be able to cover everything on this own. But two, three, or even four boosters are guaranteed to do the trick.

How do you select the best WiFi booster for your home or office? First, you need to find out areas require signal boosting and which are fine as they are. You could, of course, use an online speed test to test whether your download and upload speeds match the advertised speeds of your internet service provider. The problem with this method is that it offers little to no precision.

Online internet speed tests are affected by the total number of people using them, background network activity, and other factors. NetSpot’s Survey Mode is a much better solution. With it, you can accurately, quickly, and easily create a visual map of your entire network and see where it would be best to install a wireless signal booster.

Once you know how many WiFi boosters you need and where to install them, it’s time to decide which model to buy. Many WiFi boosters plug directly into the standard electrical outlet, making them convenient and unobtrusive.

The most significant disadvantage of this type of signal booster is the weaker performance. Stand-alone wireless boosters come with external high-gain antennas that tend to provide noticeably better boosting than the integrated antennas of plug-in boosters.

Just like you wouldn’t expect a decade old WiFi router to support all modern internet standards, you can’t expect old WiFi boosters to support the latest wireless standards and encryption algorithms. At the very least, select a booster capable of achieving the same download and upload speeds as your wireless router. Better yet, select a booster that supports the most cutting-edge technologies on the market. You may pay more, but you’ll also get a lot more mileage out of it.

Finally, consider what perks come with the wireless booster. Some boosters are bare bones and don’t come with any extra features beyond the boosting itself. Other wireless boosters can provide their users with detailed usage statistics through WiFi booster apps. Not everyone cares about extra features like this, but, if you do, make sure your WiFi booster has them.