Why Is Your Internet So Bad?
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I'm Christine Cyr-Clessette. I'm Kyra Blackwell. I'm Rosie Garan. And you're listening to The Wirecutter Show. This episode is called Why Is Your Internet So Bad? Christine and Kyra, my friends, this episode really is a public service. I'm thinking of it that way. We've secured an interview with the man who can answer the question I and so many of us have. Why is my internet

So bad. What are your setups at home? What's your drama? You know that my setup is terrible. You regularly are on video calls with me where I'm glitching out and it's a problem. Domo Arigato, Christine Roboto. It's impossible to hear you sometimes. It's really, it's embarrassing. I...

Don't be embarrassed. It's not your fault, maybe. Well, I'm hoping this episode I'll learn how to fix it, though. I'm proud to say that this is my first episode where I don't have this problem. Oh, so you just are, you have no problem with your internet. I have great internet. Yeah, but she doesn't have oven mitts or a fire extinguisher. I also live in a basement. But I have

good internet, you guys. That's great. I love that. You know, internet, it's so central to everything most of us do every day. It's basically a utility at this point. And I think a lot of people have this

problem or this complaint that their internet is terrible. And they don't necessarily know why. They just know it isn't good. If you're like me, you usually blame your internet provider. But honestly, that's not always the problem. There can be lots of things that cause your internet to not be optimal. You know, it could be the hardware in your home, how you are connected in your home. And it can also be kind of like the way you're getting your internet.

So today on the show, we're going to tap into the mind of our colleague, Joel Santadomingo. Joel is a writer at Wirecutter who covers Wi-Fi and home networks, basically all of the tools that keep us connected to our digital life. Yeah, Joel is full of hacks and tips and tricks about how to better understand and improve your internet at home. And we're going to get into all of it right after the break. Be right back. ♪

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Welcome back. Our guest today is Joel Santo Domingo, and Joel is a senior staff writer at Wirecutter who covers consumer tech, which includes things like Wi-Fi routers and hard drives. Joel's fun fact, which I love, is that he kind of technically shared a stage with Aretha Franklin, but she was on stage and he was downstage left working the computer. Joel, I love that. Welcome to the Wirecutter Show. Thanks for having me. It's really nice to have you here. But

Before we get started, we need to start this episode with just a little disclosure. I have an in-law, my sister-in-law, who works for Spectrum, the internet company, and Joel, your wife, works for Verizon. We are not going to be giving any preferential treatment to any internet service providers, but we did want to get that out of the way, so our listeners know that. We're going to talk today about how to improve the internet in your home regardless of where you get your internet. That's right. So, Joel...

Simple question. I need and want to know if you have an incredibly high threshold for pain or the patience of a patron saint, because I don't know how you test Internet connectivity every day and not want to pull all of your hair out. Truly. What's your secret? What's your process?

It's a fun process. Essentially taking my home, which is a regular two and a half story home with wood framing and adding another Wi-Fi network to it. Basically every Wi-Fi router we get in

I set it up as per the instructions and using the app or website as the case may be, just like a normal user would, setting it up, hooking up a desktop computer to it to act as a web server, simulating streaming 4K videos or surfing the web or

or taking Zoom calls, that sort of thing. So it's like the Sandra Bullock movie, The Net? Pretty much, pretty much. But it's all self-contained. It doesn't actually go out to the internet because the internet always adds extra problems with traffic and, you know, your neighbor down the street

He's streaming something, so I isolate it from the internet, and I'm just testing the radio signal going back and forth between the router and these laptops. Joel, how long have you been doing this? How long have you been testing? I've been testing for Wirecutter for about six years now, but before that, I tested PCs and other technology, including Wi-Fi, for almost 25 years, and...

Prior to that, I was an IT tech and tech manager, so I've been doing this for a while. Can I ask a really basic, stupid question? Sure. Do you want to know the plot of The Net? I love them. Go on. This is what I'm embarrassed to ask, but I honestly, I'm going to be a proxy for, I think, many listeners.

You know, a router is what gives you Wi-Fi, right? And then a modem is what's actually connecting you to the Internet, right? Right. Yeah. They're both magical little boxes, basically. A modem connects you to your Internet provider, whatever that company is, and the router is the box that tells all your devices to connect wirelessly to that Internet. Sometimes they're combined in one box called a gateway. Okay.

Joel, if people walk away with one thing after listening to this episode, what is the one trick to improve the Wi-Fi in their home? Probably the easiest thing to do would be to stay close to your router. Sitting next to your router, if you're not connected to it,

with a cord is probably the best thing. The Wi-Fi signal from your router is best in the same room the router is in, strangely enough. Is the router the thing that usually has the Wi-Fi passcode on it? It's usually the thing that has the Wi-Fi passcode on it. Sometimes it'll have antennas sticking out of it. Okay. But that's your router. It's usually a black plastic box sitting next to your cable modem. ♪

I'm realizing my router might be in the worst possible place. It's in the middle of my apartment, not in a room that I work in, not in a room I watch TV. But it's like positioned to try to access equally the places in my home where I am using internet. Middle of your living space is actually the best place for it. That way the signal is spread out. It comes out in a sphere, basically, or a circle. You want to be somewhere within the circle of coverage.

And if your router is basically beyond your line of sight, that's going to be interfering with your Wi-Fi, how? It's kind of like trying to talk to someone. If you're in the same room,

Things are going to be great. But if you're trying to talk to them and there's a wall in between you, you're not going to be able to hear them or not hear them as well. And if there's more than two walls or three walls or a brick wall, for example, it's going to block that signal. And just like if you're trying to talk to someone, Wi-Fi doesn't like going through more than a couple of walls or a brick wall. Joel, I want to be greedy and ask for one more juicy hack, please.

Turning on and off your router and modem actually will cover a multitude of sins. What do you mean by sins? Let's use the talking analogy again. If you are in a living space that is surrounded by other living spaces, like an apartment building or a condo complex,

You're going to have anywhere from a half dozen to a dozen to three dozen other Wi-Fi routers in the area. And all those routers talking at the same time will basically stomp on each other. Even if you are not connected to their network, their network is affecting you. It's kind of like when you're in a

quiet bar versus a jazz bar that is really, really hopping, you're going to have a lot of noise around you and that's going to interfere with your conversation, which is the Wi-Fi signal between you and your router. And so turning your router off and on again does what exactly? When you turn your router off and then on again, it actually looks around and sees what other signals are in the area and finds the

signal that works best in that room at that time so it can get a strong connection between your laptop and your router or your phone and your router. So it's kind of, to take it back to that restaurant analogy, it's like if you had moved to a private room that's quiet again. Pretty much. If you'd moved to a private room and it's quiet again,

Or another way I like to describe it is if you're thinking about the Wi-Fi network as you're speaking English to your router and the other routers on another channel on another network name are speaking French, for example, you don't speak French. So you're kind of ignoring it. But if that other router is strong enough or is close enough to you, even though they're speaking French and you don't understand it,

Their conversation will still impinge upon yours. So clearing the router, turning it off, turning it on again will get you to a place where you're speaking again. You're just checking with your friend. Hey, can you hear me now?

That's really what the router is doing. It's turning it off, turning it on again. And then your laptops and your smart cameras and your phone will check with your router again and say, hey, can you hear me now? Oh, I can hear you now. Let's keep going. I'm seeing like a little Pixar animated show about this situation. I know.

But, you know, Joel, from what you're saying, it sounds like if you're in an apartment building, say, like I live in, this might be a bigger issue, right? You've got a lot of people around you at different apartments that have their own routers that are trying to speak to their owners' devices, and that can get really crowded, right? If you're in a house, like, out in the country where you're not picking up anybody else's Wi-Fi signal, that's going to be less of an issue? That is absolutely true. It's kind of like moving to a quieter room, right?

When you're in a quiet room, you don't have to yell at each other. You can just speak in a normal voice. The person can be sitting across the room from you or the person can be sitting next to you, and you'll probably be able to hear them quite equally there. So if you have a more expensive router, will it work better?

Yes and no. An expensive router might have newer features like Wi-Fi 7, and Wi-Fi 7 has some features in it that will work better with crowded Wi-Fi. But if there's two brick walls, for example, between your family room and your home office, and if your router's in your family room, there's still going to be a good chance you're going to drop Wi-Fi connections.

You could install a mesh networking system, which is basically multiple routers connected together either by wires or wirelessly to improve your Wi-Fi in a larger home. But that, as they say, is a topic for another show. We do have a guide for that if you're interested. Always interested, Joel. Always. But I do have a follow-up to that. I've never actually bought my own router. I've always just rented it from whatever company services my area. But would you recommend that people go ahead and buy their own router so they're not doing that?

I get that question a lot. If you have a router that your cable company or fiber company provides you and it works great, use it. If they are charging you 10, 15 bucks a month for

for using that router, or if the router isn't quite good enough for what you need in your home, then I would suggest purchasing a router. Over time, it'll take, you know, maybe 10 to 12 months for that to pay off. In summary, though, if I'm in my panic room, let's just say, and my $600,000 router is outside of it,

It doesn't matter that it costs $600,000. It's not going to really necessarily be. Now, if you're in a steel cage, essentially, you're not probably not going to get good Wi-Fi signal from outside that room. I think that's going to be really meaningful to a lot of people. Yeah, I think that is the one takeaway you take away from this episode. Joel,

You have written a lot about different ways to improve Wi-Fi. We've covered like kind of the real basic ones here. And people can go read these pieces you've written. We're going to put them in the show notes. But I find a lot of these steps that you've written about like a little bit advanced for me personally. They're kind of like 2.0, 3.0. So I'm wondering if there is one more tip that you think would offer outsized rewards for

for doing like one action somebody can take to significantly improve the internet in their home. This really applies mainly to desktops, laptops, and things like gaming consoles. But wired is always better than wireless. If you take your laptop and hook it up to your router directly, there's going to be an ethernet port in the back. There should be a free one in the back of your router. Hook up an ethernet cord to your laptop,

Everything will be great. And I promise you that. That feels so 1990s. Yeah, get in the Wayback Machine. Yeah, I mean, I feel like I haven't used an Ethernet cord in more than a decade. It's the one tip that I give all of my coworkers if they're having problems with Zoom calls. If you clip in a Ethernet cord onto your laptop, boom, you're on Zoom calls. It's going to be steady. It's going to be great.

You're not going to look like a slideshow. Yeah, but it's not sexy. Well, you're on Zoom, so nobody can see you, Rosie. I mean, I have terrible video quality. You all know this on my calls from home. We call you Beat Borp Christine.

I actually have gotten an annual review where the only negative part of the annual review is my Wi-Fi is spotty. That's so funny. They're like, get an Ethernet cord. Get a better Internet connection. You work at Wirecutter. What is your problem? But I don't have an Ethernet port on my computer. So how do I connect? Type this into Amazon Search or any search engine in USB to Ethernet adapter.

And that will get you a probably $10 to $20 dongle, for lack of a better word, that will let you hook up Ethernet to any laptop. Also have another easy solution. You can purchase something called a power line adapter, which basically allows you to plug your router into your power lines in your house.

and then connect those power lines to your computer with an Ethernet cable. Power line adapters are pretty simple to use, and we have a guide about them on the site.

My mind is exploding right now. That's a thing. You can just use the electrical wires in your home, essentially, as what the Ethernet cord would have otherwise been doing? Absolutely. You can do it. Does it work well? It works reasonably well. It's not going to be as fast as actually taking a physical Ethernet cable and stringing that through your house.

but it'll get the job done. It's going to be good enough for a Zoom call. It's going to be good enough even for playing games. Strangely enough, my son uses a power line adapter in our home because it's faster than the Wi-Fi in playing games.

Okay, so just to summarize, if you're having trouble with your internet connection in your home, it might be your Wi-Fi. And the first thing you should try is get close to your router because you'll be closer to a stronger signal. If that doesn't work, the next thing you should do is turn it off and on. Oh my gosh. Yeah, okay, so it's old school advice, but it's classic for a reason. Now, if you

You are still, like me, having lots of issues with your internet. The best next thing you can do is probably go wired. You should just go get yourself an Ethernet cord and an adapter and plug it into your computer. Or you can try this fancier technique that Joel has explained, this power line extender, which uses the electrical wires in your home to connect you to your modem.

Yeah, that's pretty cool, actually. I think I want to try that. So now we're going to take a quick break. And then when we come back, Joel will give us some insight on how to decide on an internet package that's right for you. Be right back. Welcome back. This episode is all about how to improve your at-home internet. And our guest is Joel Santo Domingo. So we just talked about the hardware. Now let's talk about how you actually get the internet into your home.

Joel, I want you to run us through the options of Internet services in order of best to worst. What is the absolute best way to get connected to the Internet at home?

Probably the best way right now is Fiverr because it's actually a wired service that gets the fastest internet from whatever company you're using, whether it's a Verizon, AT&T, Optimum, Spectrum, whomever, to your home. What are you really looking for when you're looking for a good, fast internet service to get internet into your home? Well,

Well, Fiverr is wonderful because its upload speeds are as high as its download speeds. Download speeds are great for streaming videos and downloading updates to games on your PlayStation, for example. And they're a really easy way to sell internet plans because faster is better, right? But upload speeds are important for things like sending photos and videos to, you know, ShareDrive or Google Photos.

and Zoom meetings. The most basic internet plans come with 20 to 30 megabits per second download speeds, but only about three or five megabits per second upload speeds. That's barely enough for one Zoom call.

And if you have an upload speed of three to five megabits, that would come to a screeching halt if you have two work calls. So it sounds like the average person doesn't really need to be looking at the download speeds. What you really want to be paying attention to is upload speeds, right? So per person in a household, how fast do you want those upload speeds to be?

The average upload speed you want per person probably is somewhere between 5 and 10 megabits per second. 10 to 20 would be actually better. Mm-hmm.

But five to ten would be enough per person because each Zoom call takes about three to five megabits upload speed. And if you have two Zoom work calls and your kids are remote learning at the same time, three to five total is not going to cut it. And the most basic...

fiber plans that I've seen out there are somewhere between 150 to 300 megabits per second. Whoa, so that would be enough for like 15 people to be on a video call at home, right? Absolutely. You could have your entire family on their phones on a FaceTime call all at the same time talking to another dozen people online. Sounds like kind of a personal nightmare, but yeah. We did it during the pandemic. Which is why it sounds like a personal nightmare. Yeah.

So, Joel, you said that not everyone is set up to access fiber. So how do I figure out if I can based on where I live? There are like a dozen tools out there to find what you can get at your home. You could go to each individual site, Verizon.com, AT&T.com, T-Mobile.com, for example.

plug your address in and they'll tell you what they can give you. But there's one tool that I like to use, which is broadbandmap.fcc.gov. Enter your address and it'll tell you all of the internet providers that are registered with the FCC that can give you service at your home.

If, like me, you cannot access fiber, what's the next best option? The next best option is cable. This is the cable internet that most people are used to. Back in the day, it was an add-on to cable TV. But for the past 10 years or so, we've been seeing many cord cutters switch to internet-only plans and leaving cable TV behind. Cord cutters are those folks that instead of

having a cable box hooked up to the TV. They're just doing it through streaming boxes like an Apple TV or a Fire Stick.

Walk through the pros and cons of cable. The pros of cable is it's really easy to find. A large portion of the country has been wired for cable because cable TV really was where we got TV. And if those cables are in your walls, you can get cable internet service. What are some of the cons? Some of the cons are it can be slower, particularly on uploads. For the basic plans of cable,

Upload speeds are usually around 15 to 20 megabits per second. And while those are good enough for a smaller family, if you have an extended family living in your house, for example, that may not be enough. Okay, Joel, so what is the last option that you might be presented with from an internet service or provider if you don't want or don't have access to fiber or cable?

If you don't have access to fiber or cable, there are two wireless internet services available. Those are satellite or 5G home internet. Let's talk about 5G home internet because that's easier. 5G home internet uses wireless cell phone towers, similar to the ones that connect your internet to your cell phone. Basically, 5G home can access the internet where your phone has service.

though a 5G home router will get better reception because it's plugged in all the time and it's in a stationary place. T-Mobile, AT&T, and Verizon all have stakes in 5G home service, and they are pushing it right now. Satellite, on the other hand, uses clusters of satellites orbiting the Earth to beam internet back and forth from the surface.

So satellite's a big benefit. It works most anywhere in the country and around the world even, at sea. And it's available in rural spots where 5G and fiber are hard to find. Starlink is the flashiest of the satellite providers, but there's others like Viasat and HughesNet. Those are the other big names in satellite. And they'll basically come and install a satellite dish on the side of your house, just like satellite TV.

and drill a hole in your wall and hook that up to a router, and then you'll be able to get Wi-Fi in your home that way. The benefits are it reaches everywhere, but it's less responsive than fiber or cable for things like gaming. But they are fast enough for streaming services, so Netflix will be fine, Zoom will be fine, Teams will be fine.

So when you have a Wi-Fi name and it automatically has like, I don't know if this happens to you guys, but you get like two Wi-Fi names when you hook up to a new provider. It's like the regular name and then there's one that's a duplicate, but it says 5G next to it. What is that? Yeah, that's one of the fun things or not so fun things actually about using Wi-Fi is that older routers and sometimes the routers that you get from a cable company or a fiber company will have your network name, usually like ATT5367.

Or FreeBritney in my case. FreeBritney, and it'll see FreeBritney, and then FreeBritney-5G. And what that is, is the 5 gigahertz channel or band on your router. They separate that so if you have older devices like smart cameras or a ring doorbell, you can connect to the regular network on that, and that's slower. It's got better range, right?

Then you would connect your phones and your laptops up to the

FreeBritney-5G, and that's a little bit faster, but it's also short-range. So that is the network that might have problems if you're three, four, five rooms away from the router. That 5G is not the 5G home that we've been talking about. 5G home is a totally different thing. It's 5G as it relates to cell phones. Dash 5G on your router's Wi-Fi is the

similarly named but also confusing thing that Wi-Fi routers do. They came up with a specific name for dongle, but they didn't come up with a different term. Both called 5G, but it's two different things. They're both called 5G, but they are totally different things. Explain that one to me. Actually, don't. Don't be forgetting the confusion. Actually, don't. ♪

So, Joel, once you've looked up what's available in your area for an internet provider and you've decided whether to go with fiber cable or 5G, which sounds like that's never the first choice, the next step is to pick a company or service provider. As a customer, do you have any leverage to get a better deal than the internet providers are advertising?

You can to a certain degree. If you're lucky enough to have fiber and cable in your area, you can switch between one or the other if one is significantly cheaper for a similar package. That said, you really have to check on each provider's website if your specific home or apartment unit has services.

I've seen neighborhoods where one apartment building has cable, but units in another tower next door have fiber. Can you explain how that could be the case? It's essentially what happens with your building management or your landlord. They have to pay to have service installed in your building. In a house, though, Joel, like if I buy a house, can I call one of the companies and ask them to set up fiber in my home? How does that work? You can. They will do it.

If you pay, and sometimes it'll be as simple as, oh, you have to pay $150 for them to drill a hole in your wall. But sometimes it could cost $10,000, $20,000, I've heard from some news stories that they will have to drill holes.

And run cable underground to get to people's houses. That's some expensive Internet. Do you want it? If you want fiber, Christine, I'll come to your house. I'll drill it. I will just say one point on this price, you know, getting the best price on Internet. I have in the past called my Internet provider and negotiated down. So there is, you know, there's even scripts on the Internet how to talk down the price.

You talk with what's called their customer retention department, and you mentioned scripts online. They actually have scripts, the customer service representatives.

have scripts that they go through to say, oh, Mr. Smith, you have internet service at one gig at $60 a month. What would you say if we gave you two gigs a month for $90 or 500 meg for $30 a month? They have scripts all set up and figure out, okay, are you the type of person that will switch

tomorrow, if given a chance, or are you the type of person that would stay with that company because you're brand loyal, for example? Or too lazy. That too. Joel, I always find it rather demoralizing having to get on the phone. I always, always feel like I'm being sold things I don't need. So I want to know what

should I actually pay attention to on a phone call like that? You know, you just threw out some words that and my heart started to pound because I don't think I understood them. So what do I need to pay attention to and what can I filter out? Sure. You know, they always talk about things like high speed internet and gig speed. And those are kind of marketing terms because the FCC defines broadband speed as being anything over 100 megabits per second, which

which these days covers the most basic first-tier internet plans. Download speeds are the first thing they throw out at you because it's easy to say, oh, we've got 500, we can offer you 500 megabits per second, and that's faster than 200. But if you drill down a little bit into the fine print, you'll find the upload speeds, which are actually going to be more important for you, particularly if you work from home. And how do you even figure out what your current speed is?

Well, if you want to figure out what your current speed is, you can go to a couple of websites. The two that I like to use are speedtest.net and fast.com. Fast.com is run by Netflix. So it's a way to check if you can get Netflix in your home and if it's fast enough. But that said, go to either of these two websites and click on Go or Run Speed Test.

Speed test will automatically give you both the upload and download speed you can get from your device, from your phone, or from your laptop at that moment. On fast.com, you'll still have to click show more info to see your upload speeds. You really want to see at least 10, preferably 25 or higher on your upload speed. And, you know, Christine, actually, this would be a good tip if you're in your office and

Go to speedtest.net, and if your upload speed is two or one megabits per second, move closer to the router. Oh, my gosh. I'm just going to have my phone out like a compass all day in my apartment. It's like a radar. The old, can you hear me now? Yes. Basically. Well, before we wrap, we usually ask our guests one final question. What's the last thing you bought that you've really loved?

Actually, that would be the Breville Smart Oven Air Fryer Pro Toaster Oven. Whoa. Fancy. Yeah, it went on sale during Black Friday. So I really, I jumped on it because our 20-year-old Black & Decker toaster oven finally died. It works really, really well. Leftovers are great. My son cooks well.

frozen pizzas all the time because he is a teenager and it's great. Love it. Love it. Thanks, Joel. Thank you for demystifying this for us. You are an absolute gem and a wizard and we really appreciate it. Thank you. Thanks, Joel. Thank you.

Some real good tips in there. I never would have been able to understand it without him breaking it down to us like we're children. He was very patient. That's what I need. What are you taking away from this? All right. My big takeaway here is upload speeds. I hadn't really considered upload speeds before. And I kind of always just assumed my Internet package was not good. And I think we were always looking at the download speeds.

For me, I've just realized how important that is. And I am going to test my upload speeds in the room. I usually take my video calls and see what that speed is. And I'm likely going to try to go wired. I like that. Old school. Yeah.

For me, it's just his number one piece of advice from the top. Get close to that router. Stay close to that router. That your router is good at filtering what you need, but the further you are from it, the more likely that your neighbor's waves, especially in...

an apartment building can affect your signal. I had always assumed it was the walls that were the problem. I mean, I think the walls don't help. They don't help. But this point about the neighbors was really interesting to me. That the worst thing for your signal is traffic, i.e. your neighbors. My takeaway is that I am moving again. Hooray. And I'm ready to negotiate this time for the right internet protection.

provider and also, you know, what kind of internet I'm getting because I've never even paid attention to that. So I'm ready to haggle a little bit over the phone. Good luck. Thank you. If you want to find out more about Wirecutter's coverage or if you want to check out the guides Joel referenced today, go to nytimes.com slash Wirecutter or as ever, you can find a link in the show notes. That's it for us. Thanks so much for listening. Peace. Bye.

Thanks for listening.

I feel like this is the move if you've decided to, like, become a homesteader or a back-to-the-land person. Like, you're like, I'm moving to the country. I'm going to have a well and lots of land and goats. I'm basically describing my, like, retirement plan, but... Yeah, you want to go low-tech in every part of your life, except you want to connect to satellites orbiting the Earth. Yeah.