So, Santa delivered a brand new wireless router to you. That’s great and congratulations. The question is, how do you set it up to get the best performance out of it along with making it secure? Here’s a few tips that you might find useful. Note that these tips can be applied to any brand of router:
- Change the router name: The SSID or the name of the wireless router should be changed. Why? If you leave it to the default name, you give those who want to break into your wireless router and steal Internet access a head start to hacking you by tipping off what brand of router it is. It doesn’t matter what you name it, just pick a name that is unique. By the way, don’t bother hiding the SSID. I’ve proven to numerous people over the years that hiding it really doesn’t make it any more secure as I can find it easily using any number of tools to do so.
- Use WPA2 for wireless security: Another thing you need to do is to enable wireless security so that it keeps your wireless network secure. There’s two standards. WEP which is incredibly insecure, and WPA2 which is far more secure. Never use the former as any 12 year old could hack into your network if you do. And please pick a complex password that has upper and lower case letters as well as special characters and numbers (example don’t use “password” but use “P@$$w0rd” instead as the latter is more secure).
- Change the admin password: If you leave the default admin password in place, then anyone if they try hard enough can log into your wireless router and do anything from lock you out of it to change settings so that they can use it for their own less than noble purposes. This is another place where you’d want to pick a complex password.
- Disable or secure remote router access: For most users, there is no need to be able to access and configure the router from outside your network. Thus it would very wise to disable the ability to be able to log into and configure the router from outside your network. Now for yours truly who travels frequently and sometimes gets panic calls from my significant other asking me to “fix the Internet”, it can be handy to have this ability. But I enable all sorts of security such as complex password, plus I enable encryption so that it lessens the chance that someone could cause havoc.
- Enable simultaneous 2.4 Ghz and 5 Ghz support and make sure that the right devices use the right bands: Most if not all routers made in the last year or so support simultaneous 2.4 Ghz and 5 Ghz transmission on separate networks. You should not only enable this if it isn’t already enabled, but you should also make sure that the devices that only support 802.11 b/g only use the 2.4 Ghz band and devices that support 802.11 a/n/ac only use the 5 Ghz band. Plus you should set the 2.4 Ghz band to only connect to 802.11 b/g and the 5 Ghz band to connect only to 802.11 a/n/ac devices. The reason is that by doing so, you ensure that the slower devices don’t slow down the faster ones since they are completely seperated.
- Update the router’s firmware: When you take the router out of the box, the firmware on it will likely be out of date. By updating the firmware, you get performance tweaks and security enhancements which makes it very much worth it to spend the 10 minutes or less to update the firmware.
- Download and Save the configuration of the router: Now that you have everything set up perfectly, you should leverage a feature that most users know exists in most if not all routers which is the ability to download the configuration and save it on your computer or a thumb drive. The reason why you’d want to do this is that if you ever have to reset the router back to factory defaults (a common troubleshooting step) or you need to replace a defective one with working one of the same brand and model, you can quickly get up and running again by uploading this file to the router and let the router configure itself in seconds.
Do you have any tips or tricks that would help an owner of a new router? Please post a comment and share your thoughts.