These 5 router tweaks sped up my Wi-Fi so much that I downgraded my internet plan

How much are you paying your ISP every month? If you ask me, it's always too much, but I've had some bad luck with mine (one tried to get me to pay them $1,000 to let me leave ).

Even if you don't think your bills should be lower, or that your internet can get any slower, you might be able to pull off a coup if you just tweak your router settings. That's what I did, and I'm keeping some extra money in my pocket every month now. Here's what helped me.

Get the router out of the cupboard

I know it's not that pretty, but it needs some air

Having a router in your living room is a constant battle of wanting the place to look nice vs. wanting fast internet. In my case, I've always prioritized the latter, what with my job and all, so I didn't mind my router being an eyesore somewhere in plain sight. But many people choose to stuff theirs inside various cabinets or under the desk, which is a quick recipe for a Wi-Fi dead zone .

Radio waves lose a lot to metal shelving, mirrors, fish tanks, and foil-backed insulation, so you don't want any stuff near your router. (Unless you're adventurous like my colleague Ismar, who actually wrapped his router in aluminum foil to give it a boost.)

So, yeah, router placement. Central, high, and out in the open! Your internet might be faster or less spotty if you follow this advice.

Stop running two Wi-Fi networks

Your ISP and your router have been at war for ages

If you bought your own router ( which I always recommend doing ) and plugged it into the combined router-modem you got from your ISP, there's a good chance the ISP router is still broadcasting its own Wi-Fi.

That's right, you're essentially running two networks on one connection, and they're both eager to get some of that limited airtime in each room. There's also double NAT, which breaks port forwarding, UPnP, and some VPN game traffic. All of this can feel like slow internet, but it doesn't have to be. It could just be the way it's set up.

To fix this, log into the ISP gateway's admin page and either switch it to bridge or modem mode, or at minimum disable both of its wireless radios.

Turn on SQM instead of QoS presets

This is the change that made my old plan feel fast again

Here's a big one, although it may sound like little more than some weird letters. Most routers hand you a Quality of Service (QoS) page full of presets. They'll promise you the sun and the moon, or at the very least, prioritizing gaming or streaming. In the end, many of them don't do a whole lot. They just sort traffic without controlling how much of it piles up waiting to leave.

Meanwhile, Smart Queue Management (SQM) targets that pile of traffic, solving bufferbloat, which is latency that only pops up when your connection is busy. This is why a speed test can look fine and your ping can look steady, but a video call or a ranked match ends up in some miserable lag.

To address this whole thing, check whether you've got it by running the Waveform bufferbloat test , ideally with your PC plugged into the router. If your connection is graded below a B, there's room to improve. If your router has SQM, and plenty do under the QoS menu, switch it on. Next, enter about 90% of the speeds you just measured with that bufferbloat test.

Change your DNS resolver

Nothing in a speed test measures the slowest part of opening a page

Sorting out DNS-related stuff isn't always easy (or rather, it's easy to get it wrong ), but it can be worth it. Whenever you visit a website, any website, the first thing that happens is lookup, a process that turns that address you just typed into your browser into a number your device can actually view. That's DNS, and your ISP handles it by default, so there's nothing you have to do—but you can.

This is worth looking into if your internet seems okay otherwise, but websites load slowly. That implies your ISP's servers may be slow, too.

To sort this out, look for DNS settings under WAN or DHCP in your router, and then put in Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1 or Google's 8.8.8.8.

Stop chasing 160MHz

A wider channel is only faster while it stays clean

Higher number = better, or so we tend to think (I suppose ping, or latency, is one networking-related exception). Wider Wi-Fi channels do carry more data, so 160MHz may seem like an obvious choice. Unfortunately, that channel on the 5GHz band has to use frequencies shared with radar, and routers have to get out of the way when they detect one, so your connection may be unsatisfactory through no fault of your own. Honestly, you can't even blame your router here (but feel free to, if you like).

This one isn't a slowdown, really. Your internet will just straight up drop out when necessary, and it can get locked out of those frequencies for the next half hour. So, if your Wi-Fi keeps disconnecting and you're sure it's not your ISP being absolutely terrible , drop the 5GHz band to 80MHz in your router settings and see if that helps. The 2.4GHz band should stay at 20MHz.

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These fixes may save you some serious money down the line

Even if you don't end up downgrading your plan, these fixes can keep you from buying a new router. I know that network troubleshooting is seriously tedious, so you might feel tempted to throw it all away and either chase your ISP or buy a new device (or both), but I recommend setting aside an afternoon for going through your router settings. Trial and error is the way to go—if you know it's safe to change a setting, do it, test it, and see what happens.