As both an Internet Service Provider and business IT provider, LMi contends with a large number of issues related to WiFi on a daily basis. The symptoms of reported issues can vary greatly but the vast majority of these issues can be traced back to a few key concepts with regard to this ubiquitous technology. Given our expertise in this matter, we felt that it would benefit not only our members, but any party that’s experiencing issues with their internet, if we were to explain basic WiFi functionality, provide a non-exhaustive list of common WiFi problems, as well as some potential solutions. If you’re one of our members and have questions on the information below, or are experiencing an issue that you don’t feel is covered here, please don’t hesitate to contact us.

                Starting with the basics, WiFi is a wireless radio broadcast used to connect your WiFi capable devices in or around your home or business to the internet. WiFi, on its own, does not provide internet and requires an internet connection (which doesn’t necessarily come with WiFi.) There are an innumerable number of WiFi transmitters ranging from your standard routers to advanced mesh systems from any number of manufacturers that we won’t be able to cover. Instead, we’ll focus on the general concepts by relating them to a simple analogy and introducing concepts, problems, solutions within the framework of that analogy.

                As WiFI is a means to transmit information to, and from, your smartphone, computer, or other device to the internet, it’s similar in many ways to a discussion between two people, both in how loud each person can speak and how well they can hear the other person. If you’re standing right next to one another, then it should be simple enough to carry a conversation, but if you’re trying to speak to one another from across your home and through walls, it will be significantly more difficult. Your voice will get lost as it bounces off of walls and will be significantly reduced in volume when passing through walls. The same can be said for WiFi signals. Walls alone can account for a tremendous loss in signal strength, or how well your devices can hear and speak to one another. The thicker the walls, the harder it will be to carry a conversation through, or similarly, to watch video or browse the internet through. Additionally, multiple sets of walls (or ceilings and floors) will heavily impact the maximum range of your WiFi signal. Imagine yelling across your home or business to relay information, there will be a point where your voice will no longer be discernible, especially when we consider the other common factors below.

                The second common factor, especially in high density areas such as apartments, is congestion. Congestion refers to the number of signals in your area and the amount that they interfere with one another. Moving back to the scope of a conversation between two people, congestion is the difference between talking in an empty room or in a crowded room. The more WiFi networks in your area, which you may see when you search for WiFi networks on your devices, the more likely you are to experience the effects of congestion. In addition to the number of signals in your area, the level of activity on those signals, and the WiFi channel that they occur on also come into play. WiFi can broadcast on a variety of channels, and changing channels can sometimes help prevent congestion. If you’re in the corner of a room carrying on a conversation, while there are other conversations going on in other corners of the room, there won’t be much of an issue with your own conversation (or the others with their own conversations). However, if the room is so crowded that discussions are happening directly to your left and right, it will become increasingly difficult to listen to and talk to one another. That, is congestion in a nutshell.

                To a limited degree, your router or WiFi antennae will know to seek out less crowded channels but at a certain point, it will not be feasible to avoid congestion (at least to some degree). The final aspect of this issue is the increase in congestion when performing high bandwidth activities (teleconferencing, video streaming, downloads, uploads). This is simple enough to imagine, if you’re thinking of the data you’re using as a conversation. Greater internet usage is equivalent to more words spoken at a constant rate. It can be difficult to ask or answer a simple question when, to your right and left, are two excited conversations without pause. And it would be even harder to listen to someone tell you their story while others are telling their own stories near you. As such, high bandwidth activities are more likely to be impacted by congestion and also cause more congestion for others in your area.

                Finally, the last common factor we’d like to cover is speed. This typically isn’t limited as much by WiFi as it is by your internet plan (or what’s available in your area), but it’s something that we’d like to cover due to the frequency of this issue. To start, your internet connection has a maximum potential of what it’s capable of sending and receiving. Sending would be information that you provide to the internet, such as uploading photos or the most common (and often forgotten), requesting information to be sent to you (such as opening a webpage, starting a video, etc.) Receiving is when information is provided to you, like when you’re looking at a picture or watching a video. It’s absolutely critical to understand that WiFi cannot provide unlimited speeds, there’s a limit to the amount of information that it can send and receive as well. We’re going to modify the analogy of a conversation to stress the importance of this distinction. Your internet speed is not the same thing as your internet speed over WiFi. For those with faster connections, running a speed test or using the internet while wired physically via ethernet will always be faster and more responsive than over WiFi.

                As before, if WiFi is equivalent to the speed and clarity of a conversation between two people, then internet speed would be how quickly the person could comprehend and reply to said conversation. Slower internet speeds would be like explaining a complex topic to someone entirely new to it while faster speeds would be like a conversation between two experts in the same field. Again, we’d like to stress the difference between WiFi and internet speed. WiFi is like your ability to speak while internet speed is the thoughts before they are translated into speech. You can only speak as fast as you think, and you can’t comprehensibly speak faster than you think. In other words, your WiFi can’t be as fast or faster than your internet speed, and your internet speed will always be faster when wired directly than over WiFi.

                Before delving into the various solutions that exist for the issues above, there’s another factor that can be problematic that is caused by the issues above. This is latency, which is essentially how long it takes for information to get from you to the internet or vice versa. Revisiting the previous factors, we’ll quickly go over how each can lead to latency. Firstly, with regard to WiFi range, your voice carrying over a long distance will echo and reverberate. It’ll be less clear and mix with ambient noise as well. The lack of clarity will mean that your voice and what you’re saying will be harder to comprehend and will sometimes need to be repeated. The same is true for WiFi signals. Devices at the far end of the usable range of the signal will often need to receive the same information multiple times due to the lack of clarity or not being able to hear the message altogether. In terms of congestion, or when there are a lot of signals (conversations) happening in your area, it can lead to messages needing to be repeated or pauses to ensure that the message has been understood. The same is true for WiFi where retries in congested areas can lead to delays in your internet experience which can mean longer load times or buffering. Finally, a lack of internet speed can lead to latency in that if too much information is being sent at one time, it can overwhelm the connection and cause information to not be processed (dropped packets.) This would be the same as instructions being read off to you at a lightning pace, faster than you can comprehend. As the list of instructions continue, it’s likely that you’d need to ask to go back to previous steps and would not be able to process all of the steps as they were read off, delaying the telling of a set of instructions.

                The above list of issues is not exhaustive and our solutions below will, similarly, not be exhaustive. These are simply the most common issues and factors that we’ve experienced with our members. With respect to the above, these issues aren’t always immediately able to be diagnosed and don’t exist in a vacuum. Sometimes the issues are intermittent, only occurring at specific times such as peak hours when more people are streaming content and these issues often occur in conjunction with one another, complicating any diagnostic. Nonetheless, we have a few solutions to present for the above that have proven to be helpful in our experience.

                For reference, streaming content, on average, uses 6Mbps of your download bandwidth. If you’re seeing speeds below that, you’ll likely experience a loss in quality and likely some buffering as well. If you believe your speed to be an issue, contact us so we can see what options may be available in your area to improve your speeds. If we aren’t able to provide a more suitable service for your needs, we may still be able to advise on what other options would be the best fit for you. If your speed test performs well, then we’ll move on to other considerations.

                The next step in narrowing down your issue to find a potential solution will require some consideration as to the nature of your issue. The common factors listed above can all lead to similar symptoms such as not being able to find your WiFi network, being unable to join your WiFi network, the inability to load web pages or videos, buffering when streaming content, or just general slowness while using the internet. In rare cases, it can be the fault of the streaming service or web page itself, so you should always test from multiple internet connections (such as your phone data) to verify your issue. Furthermore, if these issues aren’t always present, it’s very important to consider as it will make certain factors more probable than others.

There are a number of potential outcomes after we’ve verified that speed itself is not an issue and we’ll cover the common ones below. If you feel that we haven’t covered your particular circumstance, please contact us so that we can look further into your particular issue.

1. If you’re testing at good speeds near your router but aren’t able to connect to your WiFi network or can’t see it from a particular area in your location, it’s most likely a range related issue.
2. If you’ve tested good speeds but have issues that correspond to certain times of the day, you are most likely experiencing WiFi Congestion.
3. If your speed test while next to your router are slower than expected, please contact us so that we can determine if there’s a better service option for you. Our newer service options can provide hundreds of times as much bandwidth at the same cost or with a marginal price increase, but are, sadly, not available in all locations currently.

                As explained before, these issues are often not mutually exclusive and are more likely to be a compound issue. As such, it’s best to review what we consider to be the best practices for resolving WiFi related issues rather than delving into every possible combination of these issues. We’ll provide context to each step so that our readers can best determine which steps may be most suitable for them. If you’re an LMi member with one of our managed routers or WiFi networks, contact us so that we can assist with configuration changes at no charge. If you have your own router, you will need to login to your router and determine which of the following options are available and which, if any, are suitable for your situation. If you need help with that, you should check the physical unit itself as it will often provide directions on accessing its configuration page, or reach out to the manufacturer. If you’re relatively tech savvy, you may find the relevant information at https://setuprouter.com.

Best Practices for WiFi

1. Most routers will allow for you to change the WiFi channel of your connection. Depending on your area, some channels will be more heavily used than others, making them more congested. Some devices will also allow for scanning of the environment to determine which channels are most appropriate for use in your area. Most modern routers will do this automatically, but it may not be doing it frequently enough or failing to assess the environment properly. There are a number of caveats that come with selecting WiFi channels that could effectively fill another blogpost but we’ll provide a general guideline.
   • 2.4Ghz networks: There are 11 channels, adjacent channels will interfere with one another. Pick the channel that has the fewest networks on it with consideration to the adjacent numbers.
   • 5Ghz: Pick the channel with the fewest networks
   • As a caveat, you can also select the band of the radio (2.4 or 5Ghz). Wider bands both cause more congestion and are more susceptible to congestion but can provide higher speeds. If you are having issues related to congestion, you should select the lowest possible band (20vht for 2.4Ghz and 40vht for 5.0Ghz, typically).
2. If your router is located in a corner of your house and you experience dead zones in the opposite corner, or if your router is located in another less central position, the best solution may be to try and move it to a more centralized position. Of course, this isn’t always feasible and it will depend on the nature of your connection and location. A good first step, if you have the router in a closed location  such as a closet, cabinet, or underneath a desk, would be to elevate the device and ensure that it isn’t enclosed in a space. Beyond that, LMi offers wiring services that may be helpful in relocating your router.
3. A more advanced option that we recommend (for more knowledgeable users), in cases where there isn’t enough internet speed available for one or more devices is Quality of Service. This is available on LMi’s current managed devices as we’ve tested its implementation on our devices but the same may not be true for our older, legacy devices or devices that we haven’t provided. If you’d like us to turn this on for LMi equipment at your home or business, contact us. Otherwise, it’s possible you may be able to find and configure the setting on your own equipment but we are unsure if it will make a noticeable impact or if it could potentially have a negative impact in your situation.

Hardware Solutions

There are also solutions that involve additional hardware. We’ll briefly discuss those third party solutions as well as include our own fully fledged WiFi solution for comparison.

1. WiFi Extenders:

These are devices that connect to your existing WiFi network and then rebroadcast it. They aren’t typically supported by the router itself so configuring and troubleshooting the device can be more finnicky but if you’d simply like to extend coverage to one particular area in your home, it may be a suitable solution.

2. High End Routers:

There are a large number of WiFi router manufacturers, each with their own product lines, so covering them all would be impossible. In the general case, more expensive routers will provide a greater range, more features, and more antennae to broadcast from to facilitate higher speeds and greater range. If you’re currently using an inexpensive router and feel that the signal is inconsistent (but still available) at the areas of your home furthest from your router, this may be a suitable solution.

3. Mesh WiFi Products

These products have exploded in popularity in the past few years with major manufacturers each bringing their own iterations to market. These products provide a “main” device which serves as your router and extends the WiFi coverage by establishing dedicated links to other access points. They can range in price depending on available features and setup is typically driven by a phone app. Generally speaking, this is a great solution that can expand to cover even a large home with complete coverage as long as you’re comfortable with a more involved set up process.

4. Always On WiFi from LMi

LMi offers our own mesh WiFi solution. While we don’t manufacture the Ubiquiti hardware that we use, we provide a complete solution that includes professional installation, monitoring, and is backed by our local customer support staff and dispatch team. The devices connect to one another via dedicated links to ensure stability and reduce potential issues. Our professional installers will be able to mount the equipment to further expand the range and can evaluate your specific situation to provide a comprehensive WiFi solution. For more information on that service, click here. 

Greetings Quaranteam!

I’m sure you all love receiving emails from every vendor you’ve ever contacted explaining how they’re dealing with COVID-19. For us, it’s simple. we’re still operating at near 100%, but we are limiting onsite work as much as possible. Everything else is more or less the status quo for us.

The real reason for this email is to help provide some guidance with the transition to working from home and to let you know that we’re always available to discuss your options and to provide a more customized remote work solution. I realize now that I’ve written a novel, which was not my intention when I started, but try to get through it all as I feel the information below will be helpful to those who are concerned about the risks of working from home or it may serve as a wake-up-call for those who think there’s nothing to worry about.

Security during COVID-19

You might have noticed that security is a common theme I mention in these email blasts. I place a special importance on security when sending these because security is usually an afterthought by most people. As long as folks can get their work done, people don’t pay special attention to security, so I like to keep reminding people that security is a constantly moving target and is a threat to your business that needs to be taken seriously even by the smallest of organizations. Consider that ransomware and other malicious organizations are multi-billion dollar “industries” that operate more or less like a normal business. They have to constantly find new targets and are always learning new ways to exploit vulnerabilities. Security systems and best-practices which were effective a few years ago may no longer be adequate.

Since COVID, cyber security experts have noticed an uptick in malicious activity worldwide including email phishing scams and malicious log in attempts. Now, more than ever, you and your staff need to be diligent in identifying and preventing attacks which prey upon our human insecurities. Many of us have applied for loans and other financial assistance which makes us particularly vulnerable to socially engineered email scams pretending to be banks or other entities asking us to provide banking or other sensitive information. Be especially diligent when providing financial information via email or through an online portal. Double check to make sure the email came from a bank or entity you have history with, confirm the sender email address, and be suspicious if they don’t provide a secure web portal that’s directly linked to their website. A particularly effective method of an attacker breaching an online account is by sending an email to someone on your team which appears to be from Microsoft, Google, or Dropbox asking the recipient to click a link which takes the user to a website which looks almost identical to the online service’s login page. When the user enters their login credentials, the malicious party is then able to obtain the credentials and can login to the real account and access data or cause other harm.

Since people’s routines are all mixed up, we’re particularly vulnerable and malicious groups know this and are actively working to exploit our inherent human weaknesses.

Two Factor Authentication (2FA)

Luckily, there are a few ways to protect yourselves and your staff from the majority of email scams trying to steal login credentials. 2 factor authentication (multi-factor authentication or MFA or 2FA) is an extremely effective method of preventing others from accessing online accounts. Many of our clients already have 2FA turned on but there are still plenty of folks we work with who do not have this most basic level of protection enabled. The good news is that it’s becoming easier to enable 2FA for services such as Office 365 and G Suite in a way that doesn’t require too much handholding from us which will help reduce costs. By enabling 2FA on the admin portal of many online services, we can force 2FA to be configured by the user the next time they log in. We always coordinate this with the users and provide documentation for the users to follow when they are presented with the setup process of 2FA. This is a great way to protect company data with little cost. Even though there’s a shelter-in-place causing financial stress all around, consider the impact a breach will have on your organization. This article contains helpful information about 2FA: https://www.microsoft.com/security/blog/2019/08/20/one-simple-action-you-can-take-to-prevent-99-9-percent-of-account-attacks/

Single Sign On (SSO)

Taking security a step further, and adding in some convenience, is enabling Single Sign-On (SSO). SSO is the future. Currently, many of our clients have multiple online cloud services they subscribe to. This means each user will have unique accounts for Office 365, Dropbox, QuickBooks Online, Autodesk, Adobe, etc. Usually the user will use a single password for all of these accounts and sometimes passwords are quite simple and easy to guess/decrypt. This means that, when a single account is compromised, other accounts can potentially be compromised as well. SSO is part of the solution to this problem. With SSO enabled and configured for the cloud services you use most often, those cloud services will look to a single master account and only allow a login using that one master account which is configured to require a strong password along with 2FA. This is why it’s called Single Sign-on. Only a single username and password is needed to access all those accounts which are protected via 2FA. Usually this single account you’d use to access all other accounts would be either your Microsoft or Google account. Now, this might sound less secure. “What if that one account is compromised?”, you might be thinking. Well, it’s true that if the one master account was compromised, there’d be a huge issue, but for that account to be compromised, the hacker would need the username, credentials, and access to a device the account owner controls to access the 2^nd factor. This is pretty unusual and stops about 99.9% of breached accounts. When a user is offboarded or if there’s a risk of the account being compromised, access to all accounts can be suspended by suspending the one master account.

We use SSO at LMi and it’s a game changer. I no longer have to type in passwords for every online service I use. I have a single account I log into which grants me access to all other accounts. It’s more secure and much more convenient. I can’t imagine going back. Unfortunately, unlike enabling 2FA for your users, enabling SSO is a more time consuming and user-impacting process, so if your business is struggling due to the shelter-in-place, this item is something we should discuss later when business returns to normal.

Try not to be intimidated by these confusing terms and processes. Once set up, these systems become second nature and actually make access easier and you’ll sleep better knowing you’ve taken reasonable steps to secure your data. Just because you’re comfortable with a process doesn’t mean it can’t change. Avoid being that organization that rushes to make a change only because a breach happened. Heed the warnings you read about here and online. This is not just fear mongering. The threats are real and, most of the time, they are not targeting you specifically. Usually malicious groups look for easy targets. Stay under the hacker’s radar!

Working from home security challenges

Luckily, some of you use professionally managed business laptops as your primary business computer which makes working from home relatively safe, but for those of you whose home users are forced to use a home computer, there are particular security concerns to be aware of:

• Home computers are generally shared with other family members and are inherently less secure than professionally managed business computers. 
• Remote logins to the office are at an all-time high and credentials can be intercepted if proper precautions aren’t in place.
• Data leakage can occur if home computers are used to store company data. Users may save email attachments, sync Dropbox/Google Drive files to their home computers, and files can be copied from the company file server directly to a home computer. If this computer were to fall into the wrong hands, either digitally or physically, company data is at risk.
• Data loss may occur if users are saving files locally to their home computers and, if something happens to the computer such as a failed hard drive or computer theft, data and productivity loss can occur.

Solutions

We have no idea how long the shelter-in-place can last so it’s probably a good idea to consider the work-from-home paradigm lasting for at least another month or two but possibly even longer. If your organization has users accessing company resources on their home computers, we highly advise getting laptops used exclusively for work. We can help select powerful laptops that will work well after people return to the office. We’ll of course be conscious of the cashflow limitations facing many organizations when selecting computers, but it’s always advisable to get business grade computers instead of rushing to BestBuy and buying a $500 laptop which will become a doorstop in 1-2 years and won’t perform as well as the computers they are used to using.

If getting new laptops is not possible, consider having LMi manage the home computer like we do the work computer. With us managing the home computers, we’ll make sure computers are up to date with security patches, have antivirus and DNS protection to help prevent malware, and we’ll be able to encrypt some computers to prevent data loss in case of theft. This also allows us to provide the same level of support to the user to keep them working efficiently.

We also offer a la carte antivirus for only a few dollars per month per computer, so this is another good option of securing a home computer.

If getting a laptop or allowing LMi to manage the home computers is out of the question, I’ll provide some tips you can tell your users to employ to help secure the home computers:

• Mac and Windows: Install MalwareBytes Antimalware. Install it, update it, and ideally pay for it so it runs in the background, but if you don’t pay, at least run it manually once per week and remove any infections it finds.
• Mac and Windows: Perform all operating systems updates manually each week.
• If there’s a company file server or cloud server, tell your staff to not save files locally to their own computers. Ask them to save important company data to the server. If the users don’t have a place to save data that’s not supposed to be shared with users, we can create personal folders for them to save their data to.
• If users have no choice but to save data locally to home computers, consider installing cloud backup software on the computers to backup company data to the cloud. Costs are around $10 per month per computer.
• If the home computer is shared with others in the home, especially teenagers, it’s highly advisable to convert user accounts used by others in the house to non-admin accounts which prevents those accounts from being able to install most malware. We can work with the user and connect remotely to configure this.
• Ask your users to alert us if they notice anything strange about their computer. They may notice additional browser plugins running they don’t recognize, or maybe they notice more pop-ups than usual, or maybe they notice a sudden slowdown. We can remotely connect and help, to a limited degree, with home computers, so we highly encourage your staff to keep a watchful eye on their computers and to alert us if anything seems out of place.

Looking ahead

Considering we might be in this surreal state for some time, it might be good to know there are options to improve how your users work remotely. For example:

-Clients who have Windows Servers are able to utilize a feature called RD Gateway which allows the user to control their work computer from their home computer without needing to connect to a VPN first. It’s a fast, efficient, reliable, and secure method of remotely controlling their office computer requiring minimal configuration from the user.

-If you’re ready to take a huge leap forward, you can ditch work desktop computers entirely and build a VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure), which essentially means the user never has a physical computer but instead remotes into a virtual computer using a small thin-client which is used only to connect to the remote server. Windows Server has the ability to provide a terminal experience which allows the user to remotely access their own virtual desktop, email, and apps without even needing a powerful work computer. This can also be done via a cloud server.

Please let us know if you want to schedule time to speak with one of us regarding anything covered above or anything else regarding changes to your IT infrastructure to accommodate remote work.

May life hopefully return to normal soon.