I've vastly improved the quality of my wifi by upgrading my routers and my devices.
The important thing to remember is that wifi always performs as the worst device on your network. A dead-zone device hurts every device on your network. A G-only device hurts every device on your network.
So, 2 routers in my sms house, hooked together wired. All my priority devices have new dual-band hardware and are on the 5ghz network. Old devices are relegated to the 2.4ghz network, which is quite spotty owing to that.
Unexpected things can do real damage too. I had an older PC that had its wifi dongle plugged into a USB 2 port and it would frequently get multi-second ping spikes. The same wifi dongle worked fine on a USB3 port. I ended up wiring that one in.
Personally I've abandoned all wifi hardware companies other than Asus - every other one has let me down at least once, if not repeatedly.
In every other respect, Asus seems to be incapable of making devices that rate higher than a B plus, but in the lowered expectations of the world of wifi hardware companies where "occasionally functional" seems to be considered good enough, Asus' spotty quality is a huge step up.
Yea, that's a fact that most people miss. Every transmission on the same channel as your wifi network slows you down. Every time two devices on that channel transmit at the same time, they both have to retransmit. They both wait a random time before retransmitting, which is good, but then they do the retransmission at a lower speed too, occupying more channel time, in order to make it more likely that their transmission succeeds. This can mean that every device eventually gives up on high-speed transfers, and starts sending every packet at the lowest possible speed.
So, 2 routers in my sms house, hooked together wired. All my priority devices have new dual-band hardware and are on the 5ghz network. Old devices are relegated to the 2.4ghz network, which is quite spotty owing to that.
Unexpected things can do real damage too. I had an older PC that had its wifi dongle plugged into a USB 2 port and it would frequently get multi-second ping spikes. The same wifi dongle worked fine on a USB3 port. I ended up wiring that one in.
Personally I've abandoned all wifi hardware companies other than Asus - every other one has let me down at least once, if not repeatedly.
In every other respect, Asus seems to be incapable of making devices that rate higher than a B plus, but in the lowered expectations of the world of wifi hardware companies where "occasionally functional" seems to be considered good enough, Asus' spotty quality is a huge step up.