Your broadband reaches the house at full speed. What slows it down is the last ten meters, through walls, floors and the odd fish tank. Here is why it happens, and the fixes to try, cheapest first.
What is going on
Wi-Fi is radio. Your router sends it out in every direction, like the light from a bulb, and everything solid in the way soaks some of it up. Plasterboard barely matters. Brick, stone and concrete matter a lot. A floor full of joists, pipes and cables is one of the worst things a signal can cross.
Most routers are put where the line comes in: by the front door, low down, often in a closet. That is the corner of the house furthest from the back bedroom, with a floor, two walls and a staircase in between.
Your router also speaks on two bands. The faster one carries much more but fades quickly through walls; the slower one reaches further. Upstairs, your laptop may be clinging to the fast band long after it should have given up, which feels slower than either.
- The router, low in a closet by the front door
- The floor: joists, pipes and cables soak up the signal
- The kitchen: a microwave and metal appliances get in the way
- The back bedroom: two walls and a floor away, one bar
Find the weak spot first
Before you change anything, run a speed test on your phone in each room, standing where you would actually use it. Write the numbers down. It takes five minutes and tells you whether the problem is one room or the whole floor.
What the numbers mean
If the room next to the router gets close to your full speed and the bedroom gets a quarter of it, the line is fine and the Wi-Fi is the problem. If every room is slow, call us instead: the fault may be on the line, and that is our job to fix.
Fixes, from free to paid
Try them in this order. Most homes are sorted by the first two.
Move the router up and out
Free
Take it out of the closet and put it on a shelf, at least a meter off the floor, in the open. If the cable reaches, the hall table or the bottom of the stairs is often the best spot in the house.
Restart it, and split the bands
Free
Turn the router off for thirty seconds. Then, in your account, give the fast and slow bands different names, and connect the upstairs laptop to the slow one. It will be steadier, and often faster in practice.
Plug the big things in with a cable
About $10
A television or games console near the router does not need Wi-Fi at all. A network cable frees up the air for everything else in the house.
Add a second Wi-Fi point upstairs
$6 a month
A mesh point on the landing picks up the signal and sends it on. Your devices move between the two without you noticing.
We lend one free for 30 days, so you can check it helps before you pay anything.
Still slow?Call our home support team on 0113 496 0260, 8am to 8pm, or book an engineer visit.