Six fixes for bad Wi-Fi in an ordinary house, cheapest first
Most home network problems are solved by moving one box or changing one setting. Buying more hardware is the fourth thing to try, not the first.
- Written by
- Ellen Marsh
- Published
- Filed under
- Tech
- Length
- 781 words, about 3 minutes
The usual sequence is backwards. Coverage is bad, so a second router gets bought, and it makes things slightly worse because it is plugged in next to the first one. Work up the list instead. Four of these six cost nothing.
1. Move the router, no purchase required
Routers end up wherever the cable enters the house, which is usually a corner of a basement or a closet behind a television. Both are close to the worst available positions.
What actually helps:
- Central in the floor plan, not central in the room.
- Off the floor. Waist height or above.
- Out of the metal cabinet and away from the water heater. Water and metal are what absorb the signal.
- Antennas vertical for a single-floor house; one vertical and one horizontal if you are covering two floors.
A longer coaxial or ethernet run from the entry point to a better location costs less than any piece of hardware on this list and outperforms most of them.
2. Split or steer the bands
Modern routers broadcast on more than one frequency band under a single network name and decide for you which one a device uses. That decision is often wrong for devices at the edge of coverage, because the faster band has the shorter range.
Two approaches, both free:
- Give each band its own name, then connect the phone and laptop to the fast one and the doorbell, thermostat and printer to the long-range one.
- Or leave the names merged and move the router closer to whatever keeps dropping.
Older sensors and appliances frequently only speak on the longer-range band and will not join a merged network at all, which explains a surprising share of devices that refuse to set up.
3. Change the channel
In an apartment building or a dense street, your neighbors' networks are the interference. The router picks a channel automatically at boot and then never revisits the choice.
Reboot it, or use the phone app to look at channel usage and set one manually. On the longer-range band there are only three channels that do not overlap, and being on the same one as the unit next door costs real throughput.
4. Wire the things that do not move
The cheapest large upgrade in a home network is a cable. A desktop, a television, a game console and a printer never move, and every one of them removed from the air makes the air better for the devices that do.
Options, in order of cost:
- A run of ethernet along a baseboard or through a basement ceiling.
- Powerline adapters, which use house wiring. Performance depends on the circuit, and two adapters on different circuits often disappoint.
- Coaxial network adapters, which use the existing television cabling. Frequently the best option in an older house that was wired for cable in every room.
5. Add one access point, wired
If two floors and a garage need coverage, one box in the middle will not do it. The correct fix is a second access point in the far zone, connected back to the router by cable. Wired backhaul is what separates this from the repeater in the next item.
Set both to the same network name and let devices hand off. This is what commercial buildings do, and it is available to a house for the price of one access point and one cable run.
6. Mesh, and when it is genuinely the answer
A mesh system is several access points that talk to each other wirelessly. It solves a real problem: coverage in a house where running cable is impractical, such as plaster over masonry, or a rental.
The tradeoff is that a node relaying over the air spends part of its capacity on the relay. A three-node mesh in a house that could have taken one cable is a worse network at a higher price. A three-node mesh in a stone house with thick interior walls is the only thing that works.
Buy mesh for the layout, not for the speed on the box.
What none of this fixes
Wi-Fi problems and internet problems get confused constantly. Test the difference in a minute: run a speed test on a device plugged directly into the router with a cable. If that number matches the plan you pay for, the network inside the house is the problem and the list above applies. If it does not, no amount of new hardware will help and the conversation is with the provider.
Worked in order, most houses stop at step two or three, having spent nothing. The households that end up needing step six usually knew from the wall construction that they would.