Your smart TV is the worst-behaved device on your network, and taming it needs a simple fix

Published Sep 8, 2026, 10:00 AM 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). There's a chance you know about the kind of havoc home automation devices can cause on your Wi-Fi. Your smart TV, however, flies under the radar, despite being riddled with most of the same issues. Unless you have a modern TV, you're probably already experiencing subpar Wi-Fi performance without knowing the device at fault. Your TV plays spoilsport either due to older Wi-Fi hardware or excessive background activity. If an actively used device is missing modern Wi-Fi features or stuck on the 2.4 GHz band, every other device on your Wi-Fi network will feel the pain. The best way to solve this is by using a wired connection to your TV to eliminate Wi-Fi shenanigans. Your smart TV has probably not seen an upgrade in years And it probbaly won't for a few more People change phones in three years, laptops in five, and PCs in six–seven years. However, if you bought a relatively expensive smart TV, you probably intend to use it for close to ten years. That's considerably long for a device that can't be upgraded in its lifetime. Due to this trend, many people are using older TVs at any given point in time, and suffering due to the older networking hardware inside them. Some old smart TVs are still on Wi-Fi 5, which means no support for crucial features like OFDMA or multi-user MIMO. These capabilities are needed to adequately manage multiple data streams without congestion or high latency. Even if you have a modern router and other clients supporting these features, your older smart TV will introduce airtime congestion as everything else waits for the TV to slowly finish its turn. Some TVs only feature support for the slower and interference-prone 2.4 GHz band, which makes all the underlying issues more pronounced. Your slower Wi-Fi devices don't just take longer to transfer the same amount of data, but make your perfectly capable Wi-Fi feel sluggish for everything else on the network. Airtime Fairness keeps your TV in line Enabling it usually works in your favor There's a setting already on your router that can fix this problem. It's called "Airtime Fairness," and it's usually found in the advanced wireless settings on your router's admin page. Enabling this feature for specific bands forces your router to give every device equal airtime instead of an equal number of turns or the same amount of bandwidth. So, it doesn't matter if you have slower legacy devices and faster modern clients on the same network. Airtime Fairness prevents any single device from hogging the airtime. Your smart TV, as a result, will get only a fixed amount of time to complete its handshake with the network, minimizing the time your faster devices have to wait in line. Removing your smart TV from Wi-Fi is the permanent fix A wired connection always wins Airtime Fairness essentially makes your slower devices absorb the airtime penalty while everything else benefits on the network. So, there's a possibility that your smart TV's performance takes a dip after enabling this feature. Fortunately, there's a better fix for bypassing your TV's poor Wi-Fi capabilities without penalizing other devices on the same network. An Ethernet connection beats Wi-Fi every time, especially for devices with aging Wi-Fi standards. By hardwiring your smart TV to the router, you remove the wireless component entirely. Your smart TV enjoys a more reliable connection, if not a faster one. And the high-priority devices on your Wi-Fi, such as your smartphone, laptop, and tablets, can enjoy a faster wireless connection. In some homes, it may not be possible to run an Ethernet cable to the TV. In such cases, you can use a powerline adapter to route a Ethernet signal to your TV without running a cable through the wall. You can make your Wi-Fi work around your older smart TV, but Ethernet still wins Older TVs can't use the benefits of modern Wi-Fi standards. They end up hogging the connection while faster devices wait in line. By enabling Airtime Fairness, you can improve your Wi-Fi performance for every other device on the network. However, it might make things worse for your smart TV. That's why it's always recommended to supply an Ethernet connection to your TV to eliminate Wi-Fi issues.