The oldest device on your Wi-Fi is quietly setting the rules for everything else

Published Nov 10, 2026, 10:00 AM EST After a 7-year corporate stint, Tanveer found his love for writing and tech too much to resist. An MBA in Marketing and the owner of a PC building business, he writes on PC hardware, technology, and Windows. When not scouring the web for ideas, he can be found building PCs, watching anime, or playing Smash Karts on his RTX 3080 (sigh). A typical household today may have north of 20 devices on the Wi-Fi network, with many homes having considerably more. With every family member having a smartphone, several tablets and laptops in the house, one or more smart TVs, and a dozen or more home automation devices online, it can get hard to keep track of exactly how many devices are connected to your Wi-Fi router. This limitation can make many people forget about their oldest, i.e., slowest Wi-Fi devices. Legacy hardware can force your router to lower the reliability of the home network for every single modern device. It's not just a question of airtime fairness; older devices with slower transmission rates can make the network slower in other ways, too. You need to adjust your router's settings if you don't want slower Wi-Fi devices dragging the network down for everything else. Your router is forced to pander to your slowest Wi-Fi device It's just how Wi-Fi works If you have a Wi-Fi 6, 6E, or 7 router, and a decently fast internet plan, your Wi-Fi network should not feel sluggish. As long as your router is choosing the right channel and most of your devices support 5 GHz or faster bands, you should be golden. However, if you're still feeling the pain, your oft-ignored devices, such as older smart switches and bulbs, printers, and even smart TVs, might be an invisible drag on your network. This is because your router needs to ensure that every device on the network can understand the language it's speaking. This means sending control frames like beacons at the lowest supported modulation rate. Some older Wi-Fi devices might be connecting to your router at, say, 1 Mbps or 11 Mbps, which forces the router to momentarily drag the network speed down for the entire network. Your newer devices still connect at the fastest possible link rate supported by them and the router, but the occasional impact on the network is still noticeable. The other tangible impact on your Wi-Fi is airtime hogging by the oldest devices on the network. Since your router's default "packet fairness" approach assigns every device an equal number of transmission opportunities, the slowest devices take longer to transmit the same amount of data. This forces your high-speed devices to wait in line, making the network appear sluggish. Enabling airtime fairness settings on the router's admin page changes this approach to one where every device is given the same amount of transmission time instead. This way, your slower devices can't hog the airtime for too long, fixing the "slow Wi-Fi" complaint echoed by your family members. Set a minimum transmission rate in your router's settings Many aftermarket routers allow it Adjusting the "basic rate" on your router's admin page can set a minimum baseline for your devices, below which the connection is denied. If your router's settings allow changing this setting, start increasing it incrementally and observe whether your smart devices stay connected. You could set it to 12 Mbps and observe the impact on your high-speed devices as well as your smart home gear. The basic rate setting is typically found in the "Advanced" Wi-Fi settings on your router's admin page, and it could be labeled "legacy rate bumping," "basic rate set," or "data rate control." You can even check your router's client table to spot any devices connecting at slower rates, such as below 10 Mbps. By tweaking this setting, you're manually controlling the handshake between your router and client devices. Any device too slow to match the new basic rate will not be allowed on the network. Alternatively, it will be forced to bump its transmission rate if it supports it. Using a dedicated SSID for slower devices might be better Quarantine your problematic devices Changing the basic rate can essentially break your smart home, or at least some of the devices on it. Raising the basic rate can cause ancient smart devices to lose connection to the network if they can't upgrade to the higher rate. They often refuse to join the network, becoming useless if you want to retain the higher basic rate. The way out of this is to create a separate IoT-only SSID for your smart devices on the 2.4 GHz band, so that they can't interfere with your high-speed devices on the 5 GHz or 6 GHz band. Your smart devices can keep connecting at lower basic rates while enjoying the greater range of the 2.4 GHz network. And the devices that really need the speed of the faster bands can leverage it without getting dragged down by your smart home. Wi-Fi is a shared, half-duplex medium, and that's at the core of everything The inherent downsides of Wi-Fi as a medium are often responsible for most practical wireless problems. Since every device needs to share the same spectrum, every single router fix is, at the end of the day, a compromise. Wi-Fi will always be inferior to Ethernet, so it's recommended to hardwire your devices whenever possible. You'll improve their reliability while also making the Wi-Fi better for everything still on it.