How to Make Your Internet Faster

For all of us Digital nomads that work on the road, having a good WiFi connection is vital. A bad connection can cost us thousands of dollars in lost work. Internet speeds can also vary drastically from country to country. In places where a connection is slow and spotty, there are several quick fixes you can try to help you surf faster and have a more stable connection.  

(Run a quick test at speedtest.net to check your download and upload speeds.)

External Wireless Card

If you are working at a coffee shop or a hotel, many times you will be far away from the router and your signal will be weak. One quick way to solve this problem and improve your signal strength is with an external wireless card. The transmitter and the big antenna can be more powerful than your computer’s internal wifi card. For the price, I think one of the best long-range wifi antennas Is the Alfa AWUS036H, which many times helps me discover a handful of new networks that my laptop’s wifi doesn’t find.

Software

You can use special software such as Dispatch to help you combine various internet connections to make one stable faster connection. At my apartment in Ho Chi Minh City I combine my laptop wifi, external card, and my smartphone 3G to make a faster reliable connection when I really need it.

I also use Connectify to share my internet connection with my wife or to speed up my other devices such as my iPad. You can also try their Speedify service which is similar to Dispatch but uses the cloud to combine and balance the load from all your available internet connections.

VideoBee is also an Android app where you can try to combine both wifi and your phone’s data to stream videos on your smartphone.

Just Plug in Your Laptop

If you are running on just your laptop’s battery power, your computer may send less power to your Wi-Fi card which may result in a weaker signal. If your signal is weak just try connecting your power cable and see if that helps.

Travel Router

If you have access to only a wired internet connection, you can try creating your own hotspot with this nifty Travel Router. The TL-WR702N is the smallest wireless router in the world and is very easy to use. All you need to do is simply plug a hotel room’s WAN cable into the port provided and enter a default password to instantly create a wireless hotspot.

Remove browser add-ons

On my Chrome browser, I have many Add-ons that help me be more productive and make surfing the web more enjoyable, but they can also slow you down quite a bit. If your internet is painfully slow, you may want to take a look at your extensions and remove/disable the ones you don’t necessarily need.

Close unwanted tabs/windows

I used to be really bad with this, I would have twenty tabs open and wonder why my browser got slow. If you don’t need it, close it. Each tab you have open is potentially eating up resources and slowing down your current tab.

Data Compression

You can also try the popular web browser Opera, which has a Turbo feature that will automatically detect when you’re on a slow internet connection. It will then start passing every website you visit through its servers and compressing the elements on the page before serving them to you.

Surfing Anonymously

Are you traveling to a country where you won’t be able to access Youtube or Facebook? You will need a VPN service to change your IP address to access blocked sites. I use a free service from BlueVPN and haven’t had any problems.

Thanks for checking out my post, I hope it helps you stay connected while traveling around the world. If you have any other tips on how to make your internet faster, please leave a comment below.