Yahoo Finance’s Tech Editor Dan Howley joins the On The Move panel to share how people working from home can boost their internet speed in hopes to manage their workflow in a timely fashion.

Video Transcript

ADAM SHAPIRO: The demands on internet and internet speeds in our current tech discussion and our tech support, how can we protect our internet speeds so we don't get that 1980s kind of robot dance effect?

DAN HOWLEY: The-- the constant buffering and changing and my mouth doesn't sync with what I'm saying, yeah. I mean, with a record number of Americans now working at home, there are obviously issues with internet connectivity. You might not have thought that you needed a better internet connection, or you might not have realized how bad your internet connection was prior to working from home. But I have some tips for you to actually improve that. The first one is to actually check what your internet speeds are, the speed that you're paying for from your provider. The minimum for broadband bandwidth is 25 megabits per second.

Now, if you're the type of person who is online trying to video chat, maybe trying to host some live shows on Hangouts from home like us, that might not be enough for you. So what you should do is look at your cable bill or your satellite bill or whatever your provider comes from and see what you are paying for. If you are the average home with number-- a number of devices online, you're streaming Netflix, 100 megabits per second is usually what you probably want.

If you're going more than that, you're streaming 4K Netflix, you have kids in the house playing games, trying to do their homework, while you're trying to do your actual work, you might want to go up to 200 megabits per second, and that should be able to get you going no problem. But beyond that, there's also things that are simpler to do, like moving your router. If your router in your home is tucked behind your TV or in a cabinet because you think it's unsightly, that's the wrong thing to do. You really want that to be out in the open. Think of your router as kind of the center of a large circle, and that circle is the effective range of your connectivity.

Now if you put it in a cabinet, you're damaging that ability to reach out to your devices. So put it out in the open. A lot of manufacturers recognize that their old routers look terrible, so now they actually made them look nice with better designs, and they want you to put it out in the open for that. If it's already out in the open and it's still not doing well, then what you may want to do is simply update your router. There's something called firmware that's built-in software for the router itself, and what you can do is visit the website that's on your screen.

It's basically a-- a URL IP address. You go there, and then you'll enter your password and username for your router. It's either "admin" for the username or "password" for the password. That's the default. Please, God, change those once you get in there. And then download the firmware update, and that will make your router run much faster than before. If you're not experiencing issues with speed but the distance that your router reaches, then you may want to get something called a Wi-Fi extender.

And what that literally does is plugs into a wall outlet and sort of sets up a secondary network that feeds off of your router and pushes that speed throughout the rest of your home. Now, they can be clunky because that's a second network you're going to have to toggle between when you move to different parts of your home, but they do work. If you want to have an easier solution, you should go with a Wi-Fi mesh network. That is, for my money, the best thing to do.

I recommended it to our own Julie Hyman because it simply is a great solution. And what this does is it sets up three different nodes of Wi-Fi routers, between two and three, throughout your home. It ensures you get the best speed possible, the best connectivity possible, and it really is the best solution, in my mind, if you have a solid connection coming from the outlet already. So those are my solutions for dealing with poor internet connectivity when working from home. And if you go through that list, you should have no problem going forward.

ADAM SHAPIRO: Hey, Dan, very quick follow-up. I'm guilty, the-- the router is actually behind the TV right now. Is just pushing it to the side, you know, back onto the, you know, that bureau next to the TV going to be OK? Because I don't have a whole lot of cable.

DAN HOWLEY: You should try to get it up on a-- on a shelf or something along those lines. I know it-- it's not ideal, but as long as it's not on the floor or behind a cabinet, something along those lines, then it should perform much better. There's also, believe it or not, an issue with interference from your walls, pipes, refrigerators, things like that. Try to keep it--

ADAM SHAPIRO: Got it.

DAN HOWLEY: --away from that as best as possible.