How To Increase Internet Speed During India Lockdown
Dhir Acharya
How To Increase Internet Speed: Best ways to improve the internet speed at your home and the best internet speed meters for your PC.
- Receive Buffers And Other Tips To Improve Your Internet Connection
- Internet Shutdowns In India By The Government Caused A $2.7 Billion Loss In 2020
- You May Not Know These Things From Before The Internet
India lockdown, many people are working from home. In fact, a large part of the world population is spending all day at home, and that’s putting a lot of stress on the internet. You may have noticed that the connection is slower than usual. To help you cope with that, this article will discuss how to increase internet speed.
Internet speed meter for PC
Before doing anything, the very first step is checking how your internet connection is doing, which can be done using internet speed test tools. So, here are the 10 best internet speed meter for PC.
- SpeedSmart
- Speed Check
- Internet Health Test
- Xfinity Speed Test
- Fast.com
- Verizon Speed Test
- Network Analyzer App
- Ookla Speedtest
- DSLReports
- Cox Internet Speed Test
So, first of all, download internet speed meter for PC and check how slow your internet is. Then, the following are suggestions for you to improve your internet speed, especially during the India lockdown.
How to increase internet speed: Use a VPN
Some internet providers throttle bandwidth for certain activities like streaming YouTube and Netflix. If this is your case, you can turn to a VPN to hide your activity to avoid being throttled by the provider. However, a VPN can also lower your internet speed through encrypting and server-hopping.
Do VPNs slow down your connection? So, this way of how to increase internet speed should be considered carefully.
Reset your router
This way helps a lot with your home network as a whole. By resetting the router, you can prevent hacking attempts, speed things up, and even help the router get important updates.
However, you need to reboot the router properly. Remember not to factory reset the thing if you don’t want to lose all of your settings. All you have to do is unplugging the router from all devices and the power source, which effectively shuts it down. Then, wait for a minute and plug it back in.
How to increase internet speed: Manage your Wi-Fi channels
Most current routers offer connections over 2.5GHz and 5GHz frequencies while some are triband and offer an extra 5HGz band for connections. Different channels mean you can divide connections across the spectrum, lowering demands for one channel, which eventually helps speed up your connections. So, managing your Wi-Fi channels can be an efficient way of how to increase internet speed.
Typically, 5GHz means a shorter range but higher speed, which is best for devices close to the router. Meanwhile, 2.5GHz means a longer range but lower speed, which is suitable for devices not close to the router or move around a lot.
Some routers include features for automatic allocation to assign and switch devices to suitable channels depending on connection needs. But in most cases, you have to do this manually by heading to the router settings.
Manage the devices on your network
Theoretically, an average home router can support 250 devices. In real life, however, the more devices are connected the harder it is for bandwidth to cover network needs, which causes slowdowns in connections.
If there are many devices connecting to your home Wi-Fi network and the speed is decreased, you should limit the number of connected devices. If your router is a newer model, you can open the router app to find the list of connected devices. If it’s an older model, you can launch a browser, type in your IP address and search for your administrator settings. Here, there should be a section under the title Restrict Access, Manage Device. The settings can vary, but here are important options you should look for.
- Finding unnecessary devices: you should kick off devices that aren’t supposed to be on your network. Besides, you can ban their MAC addresses then change the Wi-Fi password once you’re done.
- Throttle bandwidth: some routers let you kill or slow down the speeds of certain connections. This means you can give less bandwidth to devices with simple tasks, focusing more bandwidth to a device with more intensive tasks such as streaming and gaming.
- Restricting usage: routers can also limit the hours of use for specific devices, reducing stress on the bandwidth during important times. This option helps you limit your kid’s internet time too.
- Voice commands: these days, more devices have voice command compatibility. You can tell the digital assistant to disconnect an unnecessary device or change router modes.
Using Ethernet connections
If you’re using a PC or laptop and sitting close to the router, you can use a wired Ethernet connection, this is an easy and effective way of how to increase internet speed. This method is also safe, helping you avoid several issues that Wi-Fi connections can have regularly.
“Flush” your DNS
A DNS record keeps track of all the site addresses you ever visited for improving future visits. But this process only works if you and the sites you visit stay on the respective servers. In reality, many websites change servers over time, and the DNS will end up hurting your connection speed as it does not recognize the new server.
This is the reason why you may want to flush your DNS every once in a while. To do this on Windows 10, you just have to open the search box and type in Command prompt. Open the app and enter the command line as the following: “ipconfig/flushdns,” then click enter. Once the DNS is clear, Windows will notify you.
Use a faster browser
No matter which internet provider you’re relying on, the browser may sometimes be the cause of your internet slowdowns. So, in this section, we suggest how to increase Jio internet speed and how to increase internet speed in Airtel by switching to another browser.
It may be beneficial to use a browser that’s more minimalistic and loads only when it needs to. Brave and Opera are the two browsers that excel at this. Otherwise, Chome is known as among the fastest browsers existing too.
Add an extension to manage your cache
The web pages you visit are stored in your browser cache so you can reload sites more easily. When a cache is full, it can affect the online performance, but manually clearing the cache can be annoying. So, you can use a Clear Cache extension to help you with this task.
So, here are all the ways of how to increase internet speed. The last solution is upgrading your hardware by getting a new router. But this should be the last measure to take and even then, you will still need to do the things above while using the new device.