I am sure we've all been there before, everything is going smoothly and then for no reason the Internet drops out. Everything is fine all through rehearsals and then we get to showtime and we have a lag, dropped signals and disconnection which is very very frustrating. Let's take a look together at some of the root causes of these issues and how to address them in the future.

Wi-Fi is great! it allows us to always be connected to the Internet wherever we are in our homes heck even our thermostats are connected to Wi-Fi these days. However, when it comes to live-streaming Wi-Fi falls short. This is because it has some major reliability issues. The best way to think of it is if you and a friend are alone in a room talking to each other. You would easily be able to hear each other. Now imagine if you were in a crowded noisy place, you would have to talk louder and would even have to ask the other person to repeat what they said because you can't hear them very clearly. Wi-Fi operates in the radio frequency spectrum and has to compete with everything around it similar to the analogy I gave. Almost all electronic devices these days cause some sort of RF interference whether it's your smart watch your phone you're a smart TV and even smart home devices can interfere with Wi-Fi signals. But don't you worry we're gonna show you exactly how to overcome all of these issues and have a stable connection even in the most channeling environments.

The best way to ensure you have a stable Internet connection is by using a hardwired ethernet connection and not using the wifi at all. If we are hardwired into the router we are not going to have to deal with any of the issues I mentioned before. If you're lucky enough to have a computer that Apple did not decide to remove all the ports from you may already have an ethernet port built-in. If your device does not have an ethernet port you can find a fairly inexpensive ethernet to USB adapter on Amazon.

Let's say that you are required to use Wi-Fi. Whether your computer does not have an ethernet port or you're using a device such as an iPad or an iPhone which does not have the capability of plugging in ethernet. We're gonna need to consider a couple of different things in order to make sure our Wi-Fi signal is strong and stable. The very first thing to consider is your proximity to the Wi-Fi router. The closer you are to the router the stronger the signal will be. Also, remember every single wall that is between you and the router will absorb the Wi-Fi signal so the best place to place your Wi-Fi router is in the same room with line of sight to the device that you're going to be streaming with. This will make sure the signal as a strong as can be.

Not only do we have to be mindful of where we have a router we also need to be careful about what we put around our router. Since Wi-Fi works in the RF spectrum it is susceptible to a lot of different things. For example any metal or dense material that is around the wifi router Will greatly degrade the signal. This is because RF frequencies are not able to pass through these types of things. So if your Wi-Fi router is in between your DVR or on top of another metal object you're going to want to move it away from it.

The Wi-Fi network also has something called capacity. This is the number of devices that can be concurrently connected to the network at any given time before it starts to slow down. Think of it like a piece of pie and every device that is connected to your network is going to get a slice of the pie and the more devices you have to share the pie with the smaller the piece of the pie each will get and we all know if we go to a party and get one 20th of a pie we're not gonna be very happy and wish for more. Also, Most routers are also only able to communicate with one device at a time, so if you're trying to live stream the router will only talk to your computer after it talks to all the other devices on your network first. This is why we're going to want to make sure that only essential devices are connected to the network when we are doing our live stream.

A lot of times the devices on your network automatically upload data to the Internet. This could be routine back ups, syncing your photos to the cloud, or uploading to Google drive. Before the livestream we're going to want to verify that all of the services are paused so they do not compete with the bandwidth with needed for our live stream.

These days Wi-Fi routers have two types of connections. There is the 2.4gigahertz network and the 5gigahertz network. These two numbers refer to what the frequency that each uses to communicate. The 2.4 GHz network is an older version that has a much longer range, however, it has much more interference. In fact most wireless devices communicate on the 2.4 GHz frequency this includes Bluetooth as well as your microwave oven. Yes that is right turning on your microwave could make your wifi unstable. The 5 GHz network on the other hand works at a higher frequency which has much less interference, but, it will only work if you were in close proximity to the router. So if you have the option between 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz try connecting to the 5 GHz network first.

Wi-Fi it works very similar to the radio in your car. Each Wi-Fi router transmits on its own channel and we are going to want to make sure that our Wi-Fi router is transmitting on a different channel than those around us. This is because if everyone was transmitting on the same channel there would be massive interference. Please watch the video above that contains a demo of how to configure channels on your router.