[Geek Lab] Yes, walls do slow down your home Wi-Fi network — but there's a quick fix!

You might be able to relate to the following scenario — you're on the sofa near your router, and the Internet connection is blazing-fast, and live videos don't buffer in the slightest. Then you walk into your bedroom… and end up switching to your mobile data, or returning to the living room (suppose that's where your router is plugged in).

You might suspect that it's the walls that are blocking your Wi-Fi signal… and if so, you're exactly right!

Research indicates that construction materials do negatively influence the transmission of electromagnetic waves, with wood having a relatively moderate impact, followed by plaster and concrete, and then reinforced concrete (commonly seen in modern high-rises) as the worst.

Image from Golbong

A home router is generally capable of passing through two walls at most, and the signal will tend to weaken substantially with each level of obstruction.

Tearing down the walls in your home isn't a viable option, nor is changing for another material. But that doesn't mean you should be stuck with poor home Wi-Fi, as there is something really easy you can do — replace your outdated home router with a powerful, more wall-busting kind.

That's where Wi-Fi 6 comes in to the picture. This latest generation of wireless network technology delivers significantly faster Internet, expanded signal coverage and lower latency ("latency" means network delay), even when compared with the almost ubiquitous by now Wi-Fi 5.

But it gets even better: Huawei has further raised the stakes for this new tech, by unveiling a remarkable "Wi-Fi 6+" solution, which, as you'd expect from its name, goes above and beyond standard Wi-Fi 6 capabilities.

Proprietary Gigahome and Kirin Wi-Fi chips facilitate enhanced software-hardware synergy straight from the source, eliminating 80% or more of the stutter, latency and dropped frames that you encounter in conventional networks. The Gigahome chip deployed in the HONOR Router 3, and the Kirin mobile Wi-Fi chip incorporated into the newly-released HONOR 30 series phones, work in concert to further boost speeds and penetrate walls more effectively.

Then there's the inventive "Dynamic Narrow Bandwidth" concept, which enables a phone to send the signal back to the router via narrow 2 MHz channel bandwidth (which is 20 MHz at minimum in the Wi-Fi 6 protocols, often leading to lost signals and dropped connections). As a result, the phone can maintain a stable connection with the HONOR Router 3, and enjoy a reliable Wi-Fi 6+ bolstered signal, even with two or three walls in between them.

If your phone is from a couple years ago, and was built only to support Wi-Fi 5, you're still in luck! Wi-Fi 6+ is fully backwards compatible with previous standards, and will still work its magic to speed up the Wi-Fi connection on your phone!

As a cutting-edge technology, it must be pricy, you might be thinking… but you'd be highly mistaken! The HONOR Router 3 retails at just €79.90 — the cheapest router of its kind, and barely more than a Wi-Fi 5 router!

Sound too good to be true? Purchase one and try it out to see for yourself!

Source：HONOR Community