Your router's placement matters less than the airtime setting that almost nobody touches

Published Jul 30, 2026, 4:00 PM EDT 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). For the average consumer, the router's position in the house is probably the Wi-Fi variable they're most familiar with. It's simple to grasp, quick to test, and genuinely matters for coverage and speed. That said, a central router position isn't enough for a snappy Wi-Fi connection. Airtime fairness is the setting that determines the true Wi-Fi performance in an environment where newer and older devices co-exist. It prevents your legacy and smart home devices from dragging everything else down to their level. Instead of every single device getting the same priority to transmit, airtime fairness gives each device the same airtime slice, ensuring your fastest devices don't have to wait in line. An optimal router location is still necessary It's just not the main issue in modern homes Credit: SeanChangX/MakerWorld Your Wi-Fi signals don't transmit in a straight line; they emanate in a donut-shaped blanket with dead zones above and below. As you move further from the router, the signal strength drops due to the inverse-square law. The signal also gets absorbed by walls and other obstructions. To adequately cover most of your house, you need to place the router in a spot where the signal needs to travel the shortest distance to most devices. This is why it's advised to position your router roughly in the center of the house, at a height that's neither too low nor too high. That said, even an optimally placed router will always run into airtime congestion if airtime fairness is disabled. Conversely, a router with a slightly less optimal location that has airtime fairness enabled will perform better. Modern routers have sufficient range to cover small-to-medium-sized homes, so coverage is often not the bottleneck. A misconfigured scheduling algorithm has a greater impact on Wi-Fi performance than the position of the router. Airtime fairness replaces equal opportunity with equal airtime Stop legacy devices from hogging all the airtime Your Wi-Fi network allows only one device to transmit at any given moment. The default tendency of most routers is to provide an equal number of transmission opportunities to every device on the network. Regardless of the device's hardware, the router gives it ample time to transmit the same amount of data as any other device. In a network with a handful of devices, this seldom becomes an issue. However, with dozens of old and new devices connected to the router, the older devices with dated wireless radios take disproportionately long to transmit the same amount of data as your latest devices. Your smartphone, laptop, PC, or streaming box is forced to wait in line behind your smart home devices. This presents itself in the form of latency on your fastest devices, and your Wi-Fi feels slow despite a great speed test. What airtime fairness changes is the scheduling approach. Instead of equal opportunities, it allows every device an equal slice of airtime to send as much data as it can. Your high-speed devices can now transmit more data in the same amount of time, while your slower devices aren't allowed to create congestion on the network. The impact of equal airtime on your slower devices is negligible, but it gives a high priority to the devices that need it most. Your router may or may not have airtime settings exposed in the admin panel. If it's an ISP router, chances are you won't be able to tweak the settings yourself. Other routers usually have these settings in the advanced wireless settings. Most modern routers also support QoS, which is a software-level setting to manually prioritize some traffic types over others. You can combine QoS with airtime fairness to optimize your Wi-Fi for your high-priority devices. You might have to spend money on the network eventually It's only a matter of time Enabling airtime fairness solves latency issues caused by slower devices, but if your network keeps growing, you'll eventually have to resort to other fixes. For instance, your existing router's CPU may not be able to sustain the load of 40–50 devices. A Wi-Fi 6E or Wi-Fi 7 router will not only be better-equipped, but it'll also give you access to the 6 GHz band for the least congestion. You could move your fastest compatible devices to it, optimizing your band utilization. You could also migrate your smart home from Wi-Fi to another protocol, such as Zigbee. This would eliminate the possibility of older Wi-Fi 4 and Wi-Fi 5 smart devices clogging your main network. This solution will force you to spend money on new smart devices, so keep that in mind. Alternatively, you could isolate your smart devices on a separate VLAN to keep your primary network unaffected by airtime issues. TP-Link AXE5400 Tri-Band Router (Wi-Fi 6E) $100 $120 Save $20 If you want a great Wi-Fi 6e router but don't want to spend a whole lot of money, check out this one from TP-Link. Enable airtime fairness before you move your router Changing your router's position isn't always as easy as it sounds. Physical constraints might prevent you from doing it. Try airtime fairness before you invest the time and effort in moving your router. You might not need to do the latter at all. Airtime fairness might make your connection feel significantly snappier without needing to mess with the router placement.