Understanding the Most Important WiFi Settings

What WiFi Settings Are the Most Important?

The manufacturers of wireless routers know that most users don’t know how to set up WiFi at home. To make things a bit easier, they have created convenient setup applications and management consoles that neatly hide all the technical complexity behind a pretty user interface and plain language.

But there are some WiFi settings that are so important and so easy to understand that it makes sense to make an effort to understand them.

• SSID: An SSID stands for service set identifier, and it’s the primary name of a WiFi network. SSIDs are up to 32 characters long, and the characters must be ASCII-only, which is a character encoding standard for electronic communication. All routers have a certain default SSID, often corresponding to the name of the manufacturer. As a user, you’re free to change the SSID of your WiFi network as many times as you want to, and you can even make it invisible to prevent others from easily connecting to your network.


• Security Mode: To provide data confidentiality comparable to that of a traditional wired network, several security standards for wireless networks have been developed, with Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) being the oldest among them, introduced as part of the original 802.11 standard ratified in 1997. Because of its shortcomings, WEP had been superseded by Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) and later Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA2). As a rule of thumb, always use the latest security standard for wireless networks your router supports. If it’s only WEP, strongly consider buying a new router.


• Password: Even the strongest standard for wireless networks can be utterly useless if you use a weak password. A password is weak if it can be easily guessed. The weakest passwords are names, dates, or simple phrases. A step above them are passwords that are random but too short. An ideal password is so long that it can’t be brute-forced in any reasonable amount of time. If you have trouble remembering random strings consisting of letters and numbers, consider using a very long sentence instead, preferably something utterly random and ungrammatical. If you ever find yourself wondering how to set up WiFi password that can withstand the test of time as well as hackers, why not let a random password generator help you out?


• Channel: The 2.4 GHz band is divided into several channels, 11 in North America. These channels are sort of like swimming pool lines. When a swimmer in one line swims, the waves he or she creates impact swimmers in adjacent lines.The same thing happens with WiFi networks. When two networks are on the same channel, interference may occur. For this reason, you should configure your WiFi router to broadcast on the least populated channel.


• NAT: Network address translation (NAT)is a method of remapping one IP address space into another. With NAT, one public IP address can hide a number of private IP addresses. Many WiFi users encounter NAT-related issues when playing online games, and fixing them requires doing either Port Forwarding or Port Triggering, both of which can be accomplished in the NAT section of most WiFi router management consoles.


• QoS: Quality of service (QoS) is a useful feature of many newer WiFi routers. Essentially, QoS provides the ability to prioritize different applications, users, or data flows to guarantee a certain level of performance. Typically, WiFi users prioritize voice communication or online gaming over file downloads and video streaming.