Beacon Interval is one of the router settings that are often overlooked or less talked about when you are trying to optimize your wireless speed. In this simple to understand guide, we will go over what does Beacon Interval mean, the effects of higher or lower beacon value settings, and finally some scenarios where you can optimize the Beacon Interval value for your router’s wireless connection settings.
What is Beacon Interval
Beacon Broadcast interval is the time lag between each of the beacons sent by your router or access points. By definition, the lower the value, the smaller the time lag which means that the beacon is sent more frequently. The higher the value, the bigger the time lag which means that the beacon is sent broadcasted less frequently.
The beacon is needed for your devices or clients to receive information about the particular router. In this case the beacon includes some main information such as SSID, Timestamp, and various parameters.
Most of the routers out of the box has the default Beacon Interval function value set at 100 ms. In most cases it is a decent number that is compatible with most of the situations. However, it is not the optimal ideal value since it all really depends on how you are setting up your network.
Benefit of Higher or Lower Beacon Interval
High Beacon Interval:
The beacons broadcasted by your router takes up some of the bandwidth that can be used for the actual data transmission. So by having higher numbers, you will be able to achieve better throughput and thus better speed and performance.
Your mobile devices such as tablets (ipad or galaxy), phones such as Apple iphone or android phones, VoIP systems, and laptops may also have better battery life. As your wireless adapter card is able to “sleep” in between the beacon broadcasts, your devices save energy consumption which equate to longer battery use between charge.
Low Beacon Interval:
Lower beacon interval allows faster discovery of the routers because it sends beacons much more frequently. It can help with weak signal with poor reception environments since the devices have better chances of “catching” the beacons when they are sent more frequently. It can also assist with multiple access points with roaming setup, since your devices can make better decisions about which AP to connect to.
In some special cases, low beacon broadcasting interval can improve the connection by “not” letting your wireless devices go into sleep. However, this situation is pretty rare as there are sometimes equivalent router settings that discourages your mobile devices from entering sleep mode.
Common Beacon Interval Configuration Range
Depending on the brand and manufacturer of your router, different brands and models offer different allowable beacon interval ranges. The default is usually 100 ms. And the range allowed is usually between 20~1000 (Asus), 1~65535 (Netgear), 25~500 (D-Link), 1024. The range usually cannot be altered unless you install a third party firmware.
How to Optimize Your Router’s Beacon Interval Settings
Some of the popular guides or discussions simply tell you to change your wifi’s beacon interval to 50 vs the 100 ms default value. It is plainly incorrect or often a bad advice to do so.
To really know the optimal value that you should use, first you should understand what the beacon interval is and look at your wireless network’s router setup to tweak for the best value. In most cases for a basic home purpose where you have a single router or access point, you should generally go with the highest value allowed. Simply go to your router’s setup page, and punch in the highest value and your router will probably let you know the number that they will go with.
The reason behind this tweak is pretty simple, your basic home network probably does not implement multiple AP’s that you can benefit from roaming. And you probably do not roam around your houses at fast speeds while using your wifi devices within your house. May you be watching streaming TV or movies, or playing games, you will probably stay in one fixed spot and not disconnect your wireless connection and reconnect it often.
And in online gaming, you probably already have a decent setup and you usually will stay in one spot with decent signal strength. This means that you will not benefit at all from lower beacon interval values, in fact, you want a highest value possible so that you can save all the available bandwidth for your gaming purposes.
Now, when you start adding multiple AP’s to your wireless network, you may have to be extra careful to tuning of the beacon interval configuration. You want the beacon to be broadcast often enough so that your wifi clients pick up while saving up that bandwidth to make the overall performance worthwhile. In this case, if you are having trouble with roaming at 100 ms, then you can consider to change the value by dropping it to 50 ms first, then tweak the settings continuously while monitoring your network’s performance.
Finally, depending on your actual network usage, you may also need a lower beacon interval. This case is only valid when you have devices that require time sensitive broadcasts such as VoIP, mobile phones that pick up calls, or AirPlay. You do not want to setup your wifi network configuration in such a way that your devices wake up every 10 minutes to pick up calls or notifications.
In general, you will start to experience and really notice performance downgrades when you have beacon interval below 5ms. (Even the the performance downgrade is still there for higher values, they are just less noticeable).
Relevant Beacon Interval Related Terms
Beacon Interval Linksys
Beacon Interval tomato
Beacon Interval Asus
Beacon Interval Belkin
Beacon Interval Cisco
Beacon Interval DD Wrt
Beacon Interval D-Link
Beacon Interval Huawei
Beacon Interval Netgear
Beacon Interval Motorola
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Dude, i boost my internet speed by 10% and my upload is usally is 50Mbps But now is 51 Mbps! And My Download is stable Great Optimization For Any Old Rounter
Dude you are awesome ty buddy
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+1 🙂 worked for me! thanks
Be careful setting Beacon Interval to the highest value allowed, because you won’t be able to connect to the AP! That’s what happened to me.
thank you very much
Thank you for this useful information!
Nothing 😀
i want to put MBs limit on my wifi users
can any one hel?
Thanks for the information, very very helpful website. but this writing shows the complexity of networks.
Thanks for the information. I was setting up my router.
found this useful. my router doesnt give the option of reducing wifi signal strength tx. how do i reduce it ? any third part installs for it?
Plain wrong information go lower or your devices wifi will go on and off all the time!
Maybe the power too weak, too low antenna db gain, or less sensitive, or too many strong router at same channel ?
I was looking for information how to set Beacon Interval properly, and I found your post! Thank you for posting this valuable information.
very good ful fill information. thanks a lot
Thanks for publishing all of this very useful information. Was having issues on my 2.4 ghz network with all the older devices stuck on it rather than 5 ghz. Simply changing my beacon interval adjusted my Vizio speed by upwards of 300% for the better! No more 25% loading screen and some very nice HD quality!
From and to what value did you change your beacon interval to?
hello,u mean u raised the Beacon interval or lowered
Hi Spencer, You changed HIGH or LOW ? Thank you.
Thank you so much!
There is a ton of info provided but can’t seem to find anything on the setting Wan Blocking. Should I enable or disable it because I’m having trouble finding my Playon MediaMall Server and Plex Server using an Entertainment software called Kodi formerly known as XBMC. Thanks in advance for anyone’s help on this.
WAN Blocking – WAN stands for Wide Area Network, and in this case refers to the internet. Your home network is called a LAN, or Local Area Network. When disabled, this setting allows other computers from the internet to not only detect your home network, but also communicate with devices within your network. As another gentleman put it, WAN Blocking is like ignoring knocks at your front door: usually the person just leaves assuming no one’s home. Disabling this is tantamount to answering every time there’s a knock at the door. However, in the world of networking, this is just like having a doorman inviting any & all strangers inside, without any regard for safety. Most of us don’t need this, as we send our requests out to the internet, & all our data/surfing is just a response to our initial query. When you Google something, when you check your email, watch YouTube: these are all initiated by us. It gets dangerous (unless you’re a server with proper security) to allow just anyone to dig around our network. If you don’t have a need for another computer to seek out your network at it’s whim (and you don’t in the vast number of non-commercial cases), you should leave this setting enabled.
Could some one please share some information over Avaya 9132 Access Point.
Hi there,
I have been working on the avaya 91XX series of apns for a couple of years. I am by no means a expert, but i have been working with avaya support to get our systems optimised. let me know what type of problems you are having
I want to slow down the internet for mobile devices so that i, who plays on the computer gets the benefit, yeah it’s selfish but they keep downloading apps
Thanks a lot…
Thank you very much for this information!