Is Your WiFi Limiting Your Home Internet Performance?

If you’re frustrated with the speed of your home Internet, what can you do to improve it? Before making the leap to a new provider or absorbing the often difficult-to-swallow costs of a high-speed service plan, you might want to consider another culprit of slow Internet: your WiFi connection. WiFi connection performance is determined by factors independent of your access connection, while the access connection performance is (primarily) determined by the specific service contract you purchase from a service provider (ISP). WiFi bottlenecks occur when the speed of your WiFi connection (the WiFi speed) is worse than the speed of the access connection (the access speed). We explore how often WiFi bottlenecks occur and the relative difference between WiFi speeds and access speeds using data collected from households in Chicago.

• WiFi bottlenecks occur across most households in our data. Households that subscribe to Internet plans with high access speeds (200 Mbps or greater) experience significantly more WiFi bottlenecks than households that subscribe to plans with low access speeds (less than 200 Mbps). In some cases, due to the presence of bottlenecks, the actual speeds at which households use the Internet are much lower than the Internet speed that they are buying from an ISP.
• Consumers looking to improve their home Internet performance should check to see if their WiFi setup supports the speed tier that they buy from an ISP. If your WiFi speed is consistently lower than your access speed, consider upgrading your WiFi router, moving it to a new location in your house, purchasing WiFi extenders, and other solutions to improve your WiFi performance. When purchasing new Internet service or upgrading your current service, consider whether your WiFi setup can support the offered access speeds.
• Infrastructure investments improve the access speeds for a community, but whether these investments will improve the community’s lived online experience depends on complementary policies to improve WiFi networks. For example, a policy that aims to build a high-speed fiber network in a city should also include investments to supply residents with WiFi equipment that supports the access speeds that a fiber network enables.