Slow internet is usually one of a few things, and most of them you can check yourself in about ten minutes. Whether you are working from home, streaming, or gaming, here is how to work out what is actually slowing you down and what to do about it. We have put the diagnostic steps first, because fixing the wrong thing is the most common way people waste an afternoon.
First, work out whether it is your internet or your wifi
These are two different problems and they have two different fixes. Plug a laptop straight into your router with an ethernet cable and run a speed test. If the wired result is close to the speed you pay for, your internet is fine and the problem is your wifi, so everything below about placement, interference and equipment applies. If the wired result is also slow, the problem is upstream of your house and no amount of router shuffling will fix it. In that case check whether there is a known outage in your area first, then call us.
If you are an Intellipop customer, you can check your connection and see any current outage at intellipop.com/outage.
If that test pointed at your wifi, your router is the most likely culprit, and the right router depends on the size and layout of your home. Our router finder asks a few questions and tells you which one fits.
Check your plan
Before trying anything else, make sure you are on a plan that fits how you actually use the internet. One of the most common issues we see is a connection being maxed out. It is similar to turning every sink on in the house and noticing the water pressure drop. Nothing is broken, the pipe is just full. If that sounds like your evenings, you likely need more speed rather than more troubleshooting. Give us a call or text at 801-851-1770 and we will tell you what is available at your address.
Restart your router
A restart fixes more than people expect. Unplug the router from power, wait about thirty seconds, then plug it back in. Beyond clearing out whatever state it was stuck in, a rebooting router rescans the airwaves around your home and picks the wifi channel with the least interference. That interference changes as your neighbours add devices, so a router that picked a clear channel a year ago may be sitting on a crowded one today.
Plug in the things that matter
Wifi is convenient and it is always a compromise. Anything that sits in one place and moves a lot of data deserves a cable: a desktop, a game console, a work machine, a television doing 4K. Running an ethernet cable to those frees up airtime for everything that genuinely needs to be wireless. This is the single change that most reliably improves a busy household, and it costs the price of a cable.
Cut down what is connected
Every device on your wifi takes a turn talking to the router, including the ones nobody is using. Old phones, tablets in a drawer, a laptop asleep on a shelf, smart plugs you forgot about. They all check in. Getting the idle ones off your network, or onto a cable, gives the devices you are actually using more room.
Move your router
Wifi radiates outward from the router, so a router in a corner or a basement is sending most of its signal into the ground or your neighbour’s garden. Put it somewhere central, out in the open, and up off the floor. Keep it away from anything with a motor or a magnet, and away from microwaves and cordless phone bases, which sit on the same frequencies. Thick walls, brick, tile and anything with metal in it are what actually stop a signal.
Your network is only as fast as its slowest point
This is the rule that explains most confusing results. If you test at full speed plugged into your equipment and then see a large drop over wifi, the problem lives between those two points, which means it is your router or your wifi rather than your service. Old cables are a common culprit. Ethernet cable is rated by category, and a cable rated for slower speeds will cap everything behind it no matter how fast your plan is. The same goes for an ageing router that cannot pass gigabit speeds even when the connection reaching it can.
Not sure which router you need? Use the router finder
Router shopping is genuinely confusing, and most of the advice online is written to sell you the most expensive option. A bigger house needs coverage, a busy house needs capacity, and those are not the same problem. Buying for the wrong one is how people end up with an expensive router that still drops in the back bedroom.
We built a short tool that asks about the size and layout of your home, how many devices you run and what you do with them, then tells you which router actually fits. It takes about a minute and there is nothing to fill in.
Find the right router for your home
If you would rather not think about it at all, we also offer Managed WiFi, where we supply the router, set it up and keep it running. Both options are on the same page.
Update your router firmware
Router manufacturers ship fixes for performance and for security, and most routers will not install them on their own. Check the manufacturer’s site or app for your model and follow their instructions. If you lease your router from us, we handle this and you can skip it.
If you are on fiber, watch your upload speed
Most internet in the United States is built to send data down to you much faster than it sends data back out. That is why a video call can look fine to you and stutter for everyone else, and why a large backup or file upload can bring the whole house to a crawl while it runs.
Fiber does not have to work that way. Our fiber plans are symmetrical, which means the upload speed matches the download speed. If your video calls, cloud backups, security cameras or game streaming have ever felt like the weak link, that is the number to pay attention to, and it is the one most providers do not advertise. When you run a speed test, look at the upload figure as carefully as the download figure.
How to run a speed test that actually tells you something
A speed test measures the connection between one device and one server at one moment, so a bad result on its own does not tell you much. To get a number you can trust, test on a computer plugged in with an ethernet cable rather than over wifi, close anything that is streaming or downloading first, and run it more than once at different times of day. Then compare the result to the speed on your plan, not to the fastest number you have ever seen.
Testing over wifi on a phone in the far corner of the house is the most common way people conclude their internet is broken when it is not.
One thing that will not help
Clearing your browser cache and history will not speed up your internet connection. It is good housekeeping and it can make a sluggish browser feel better, but your cache has nothing to do with how fast data reaches your house. Plenty of advice online lists it as a fix. It is not one, and we would rather tell you that than pad the list.
Still slow?
If you have worked through the list and things are still not right, the next step depends on what you found.
If your wired speed is good and wifi is the weak point, start with the router finder. If your wired speed is also slow, check for a current outage at intellipop.com/outage, then call or text us at 801-851-1770. Our support team is local and answers 24 hours a day, and most issues get sorted on the first contact.
And if you are reading this because your current provider cannot give you a straight answer, see what fiber is available at your address at intellipop.com. Every price we publish is your all-in total, there are no contracts, and the price does not change after a promotional period, because we do not run one.
