If you’re looking to purchase a soundbar, it’s worth knowing whether or not your new device will interfere with your WiFi.
Soundbars are great additions to home theaters and living rooms, but they can also be a pain when they cause problems with wireless internet connectivity.
This is often because wireless routers (the devices that connect all the computers in your home) operate on the same frequency range as some soundbars—and when that happens, neither product can work as effectively as it should.
Can Soundbar Interfere With My WiFi
The short answer is yes; a soundbar can interfere with WiFi devices. Soundbars are designed to output audio using radio waves that fall in the same frequency range as your home WiFi router and other wireless devices. This causes interference between the two devices. The soundbar may also use different frequencies than your router. However, it’s still likely to cause interference because of how close they are and their proximity to you when you’re watching TV or listening to music.
The soundbar can interfere with your WiFi signals in a few different ways
- Physical interference: The soundbar might be placed right next to a router or in front of it, either physically blocking the signal or absorbing it.
- Electromagnetic interference: You can’t see electromagnetic waves, but they do exist, and they interfere with WiFi signals. They’re most often emitted by devices that use electricity (like your TV) and anything else that’s plugged into an electrical outlet.
- Congestion: When you have a lot of people using WiFi at once in your home, it can slow down the network for everyone else on it — including your soundbar!
Your WiFi may be cutting out, and you may not think it’s the soundbar
If you’re having trouble with your WiFi, you may not know that it could be the soundbar interfering with your router.
Soundbars are often positioned near routers and can cause interference from the electromagnetic waves emitted by both devices.
Depending on how close the two devices are to each other, this interference can range from minor issues like buffering or an occasional drop-in connection speed to complete disruption of your wireless network’s services. If your WiFi isn’t working consistently in areas where it used to perform delicately, or if streaming music or video content has become an issue since installing a soundbar, consider whether it could be disrupting your home network’s signals.
How to tell if your soundbar is interfering with your WiFi
If you suspect your soundbar is slowing down your WiFi, here are some things you can do:
- Test your bandwidth while using the soundbar. If it’s noticeably slower, it can interfere with your WiFi.
- Turn off the soundbar and see if the WiFi improves. If so, then there may be a problem with interference between them.
- Turn off other devices connected to WiFi, one at a time (e.g., laptops), and see if the WiFi improves in their absence. If so, that device was causing interference by hogging too much bandwidth or by sending out signals on frequencies shared with those used by routers.
Test your bandwidth while using the soundbar
Test your bandwidth while using the soundbar.
If you have a hard time connecting to a network or the speed of your connection drops when you’re using the soundbar, then it is likely that they are causing interference with each other.
Several free bandwidth meters and speed tests available online can help determine if this is true for you. Some even offer additional information about how much data was transferred in each test, which can be especially useful when finding out if specific devices are causing problems on your network.
In addition, some apps will also provide recommendations for improving performance based on their findings.
Try turning the soundbar off and seeing if the WiFi improves
If you turn your soundbar off and the WiFi improves, then this means that your soundbar is interfering with your WiFi. In this case, you will need to troubleshoot the problem from there.
If turning off the soundbar doesn’t improve your WiFi performance, it isn’t causing any issues!
Turn off the other devices connected to the WiFi, one at a time, seeing if the WiFi improves each time
If the WiFi signal is still poor, try to turn off all of the connected devices. One at a time, turn off each device that isn’t being used. Turn off the soundbar last and see if there’s an improvement in the strength of your WiFi signal when you do so.
If there was no change in your WiFi signal after turning off all of these devices, they’re likely interfering somehow, and you’ll need to move them farther apart from one another.
If your internet connection is slow, it could be because of how close your soundbar is to your router
If your internet connection is slow, it could be because of how close your soundbar is to your router. If the placement of the soundbar interferes with the WiFi signal, try moving it away from the router or vice versa. You may need to move or even get a new router that uses a different type of connection (ZigBee) for them not to interfere with each other.
So, what can you do? First, if the WiFi problem is coming from your soundbar, move it as far away from your router as possible. Second, if you’re having issues with a wireless network in general (that is not connected to a soundbar), check out these tips on boosting your WiFi signal throughout your home.