How to Increase Internet Speed

1. Position the router properly

Wifi signal degrades with distance and is absorbed by walls, water, and metal. A router shoved into a cupboard, on the floor, or behind the TV will deliver a fraction of its real capability.

• Place the router centrally in the home, ideally one floor up if the home has multiple levels.
• Raise it off the floor — a shelf at head height is ideal.
• Keep it away from microwaves, cordless phones, baby monitors and other 2.4 GHz devices.
• Don't put it next to a fish tank or aquarium — water is a strong absorber of wifi signal.
• Antennas (if external) should be vertical for single-floor coverage, or one vertical and one horizontal for multi-floor.

2. Switch to ethernet for the devices that matter

Wifi is convenient but inherently variable. For anything that should "just work" — a desktop PC, a games console, a smart TV, a home office docking station — running a cable to the router will produce a faster, more stable, lower-latency connection than wifi ever can.

A Cat 6 ethernet cable is cheap and supports speeds up to 10 Gbps, which is faster than any current consumer broadband. Flat ethernet cables run under carpets and along skirting boards almost invisibly.

3. Use the 5 GHz band, or Wi-Fi 6

Modern routers broadcast on two bands: 2.4 GHz (longer range, slower, crowded) and 5 GHz (shorter range, much faster). Connect your fastest devices to the 5 GHz network and leave older or low-priority devices on 2.4 GHz.

If your router is more than five years old, upgrading to a Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax) router is the single biggest hardware improvement most homes can make — better range, much better behaviour when several devices are active at once, and broader simultaneous coverage.

4. Reduce the number of competing devices

A modern home has a long tail of connected devices: phones, tablets, laptops, smart TVs, consoles, doorbells, security cameras, smart speakers, thermostats. Each one consumes a small amount of bandwidth in the background, and the total adds up.

Two specific fixes:

• Pause automatic backups (iCloud, Google Photos, Dropbox, OneDrive) during work or gaming sessions. They will catch up overnight.
• Turn off automatic console updates and schedule them for the small hours.

5. Restart the router every few weeks

Routers are small computers running for years on end. They drift — memory leaks, stale connections, accumulated state. A monthly reboot is enough to keep most routers behaving well. If you have to reboot yours every few days to stay fast, the router itself is the problem and replacing it will fix more than it costs.

6. Reduce ping for gaming & video calls

Bandwidth and ping are different things. You can have huge bandwidth and still feel laggy if the ping is high. Steps that specifically help ping:

• Connect by ethernet — wifi adds variable delay that wired cannot.
• Disable any VPN.
• If you live in a flat with dozens of neighbouring wifi networks, switch to the 5 GHz band — far less crowded.
• For competitive gaming, pick a server that is geographically near you.
• Some routers expose a "QoS" or "Gaming" setting that prioritises latency-sensitive traffic; enable it.

7. Upgrade your hardware before your plan

If the router supplied by your ISP is several years old, replacing it with a current Wi-Fi 6 model often delivers a bigger real-world improvement than paying for a higher tier — because the bottleneck was the wifi link, not the broadband line.

For a large home, a mesh wifi system (multiple coordinated access points) is usually a better answer than a single high-end router plus a separate range extender.

8. Compare ISPs and packages

If your line is genuinely the limit — wired tests are at or near the advertised speed but it's still not enough — it's time to look at packages. Things to check before signing:

• Headline download speed, but also upload speed if you do video calls or back up to the cloud.
• Whether the package is symmetric (the same up as down) — modern fibre often is.
• Contract length and price-after-promo — many cheap deals double in cost after twelve or eighteen months.
• Independent reviews of the ISP's reliability and customer service, not just speed.

9. When to call your ISP

If wired tests are consistently below 60% of the advertised speed across multiple days and times of day, you have grounds to raise it. Have the dates, times, and speed-test results ready — ISP support teams move much faster when given concrete evidence rather than "it feels slow".