With everyone home these days, many are feeling the pains of adjustment – disrupted routine, distractions at home, no breaks from family time. Here are some tips for maximizing your Wi-Fi network so you can stay productive at home and keep your family members safe and happy.
Make sure your workspace has the coverage and speed you need
If you’re working from home, you want to make sure your office or workspace has plenty of Wi-Fi coverage. To do this, put your gateway in a central location in the home – and tighten those cables – to ensure it blankets the vast majority of your home with strong W-Fi coverage. The lights should be flashing on the gateway – this is a sign the signal is working. If you’re finding your home workspace is in a corner of the home that does not have good signal, set up xFi pods to extend solid Wi-Fi coverage to this hard to reach area of the house.
You can also run an xFi speed test that monitors and reports the speeds you’re experiencing on that specific device to ensure its operating at the level you need it to. xFi will then provide tips and tricks on how to better optimize speeds for your devices in your home.
Video conference like a boss
It is especially important to have a solid connection if you’re video conferencing. Our network has reported a 212 percent increase in video chat use in March as customers moved to work and educate from home. To have the best internet connection during a video conference, have your laptop in the same room as your gateway. Having a clear, unobstructed connection to the gateway will optimize the Wi-Fi signal. You can even turn off high-bandwidth devices like security cameras, if you aren’t using them, to reduce the Wi-Fi load on your home. While our gateways provide excellent coverage for most homes, if you want the most powerful and direct connection for critically important video calls, then another option would be to connect directly into the gateway using one of the ethernet ports we purposefully designed into all of our gateways.
Keep the kids on a schedule
With kids out of school, it’s important to keep them on a schedule and routine. We’ve built parental control tools into xFi, a digital dashboard for managing your home Wi-Fi network free for all xFi customers, so parents can monitor when and how long their kids are online. We’ve seen a 30% increase in xFi logins since families have started sheltering in place.
Parents can use the xFi screen time scheduling tool to allot specific online and offline hours while kids stay home. With kids being home, parents can easily adjust their screen time rules to allow for schoolwork time, a movie break, and more. Parents can also utilize the xFi timed alerts feature to monitor how long kids are on their devices during the day, extending where needed to ensure kids have the online hours they need to connect with teachers and classmates and complete homework.
Protect what’s connected
With everyone home and connected, make sure all of your devices are protected with xFi Advanced Security. It’s free for all customers who lease an xFi gateway and it automatically protects devices from online threats when you log in to xFi online or download the app. It uses artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning technology to monitor and analyze Wi-Fi traffic in the home, and automatically blocks identified suspicious activity in real time so all of your connected devices are safe.
Hit pause for some family time
During these uncertain times, staying connected with family and friends is key. With xFi, you can hit pause on the devices in your home to free up time with family without digital distractions — pause all devices or just a few so you can video chat with family members or friends near and far.
For many people, it’s never been a more important time to be connected to the outside world; for work, school and to vital information about what’s happening in your community and the world. We’re providing our customers with the tools to help ensure that connection is strong, healthy and safe.