Does your WiFi signal reach all the rooms in your house? The internet is a tightly integrated part of modern society and being cut off can be frustrating, so you might want to fix this issue. Luckily I have some tips to achieve full coverage of your house, so read on to find out more.
Position your router in the best place
If you’re suffering from bad WiFi coverage, the first thing you should try is moving your router. The router itself will emit a sphere of coverage in all directions which can extend to a radius of roughly 3 rooms from the router, so it’s worth putting it in the centre of your house. This may sound easy enough, but depending on your internet provider, this may or may not be possible. If your router connects to an old-fashioned telephone socket, you can usually just connect it to another telephone socket. Failing that, you can buy an extension cable to run from the telephone socket to the router. Just make sure it’s high quality and well insulated so it has a minimal impact on your internet speed.
On the other hand, if you have a superfast broadband connection run to your house by an engineer, you might not be able to move the router. For example, Virgin Media connections will have a single point of entry to your home and there’s no way for customers to extend the cable. In this scenario, you’ll need to speak to your broadband provider about sending an engineer to your house. This is usually quite pricey so I would suggest trying some of the below steps before you do this.
Try a WiFi extender
If moving your router isn’t a solution to your problem, you can try buying a WiFi extender. These are relatively inexpensive and they work by connecting to your current network then rebroadcasting it. What this means is that the WiFi extender needs to be positioned within the coverage of your router, but it allows you to greatly increase the coverage. Luckily, positioning a WiFi extender is rather straightforward because you can plug them into any power socket.
One of the disadvantages of WiFi extenders is that they often create two different networks, it’s a bit like having two routers. As a result, there may be a slight disruption as you move from one side of your house to the other. This isn’t really noticeable in everyday life but certain activities such as video calls are likely to fail when you move between the two networks. Another disadvantage is that the internet performance can take a hit. In reality, this is quite insignificant and most people won’t notice it, but gamers should beware of the potential lag due to increased latency. If you need the best possible internet performance, your best option is a direct ethernet cable.
Other solutions
I’m not sure about you, but I seem to have a lot of old routers lying around. Whenever we had a broadband issue, our provider would just send us a new router to supposedly fix the problem. Here’s the trick, you can use old routers to extend your current network. To do this, you’ll need to run an ethernet cable between your primary router and the extra router. If you can't do that, a pair of powerline ethernet adapters will work just fine. Plug either end of the cable into the ethernet ports and you should be away. In my previous testing, the router seems to configure itself automatically and share the internet connection across the cable. If it doesn’t work immediately, don’t be afraid to fiddle around with the settings. A quick Google search will reveal some great guides to help you out.
You might not consider this last point a solution, but it’s worth thinking about. Do you need WiFi in all the rooms of your house? Maybe you have empty rooms which you rarely use, in which case do they really need WiFi coverage? In this modern world of mobile internet, the 4G data on my smartphone is just as fast as my home broadband, so on the odd occasion that I roam outside of the WiFi coverage, the experience is relatively painless.
Conclusion
WiFi doesn’t always reach to where we need it, but there are several inexspensive solutions to the problem. I hope that if you are having WiFi problems, you are now in a position to be able to fix it. If you would like to ask any questions, feel free to post a comment and tag me with @willp789 so I can find it.
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Will is a tech fanatic who likes coffee and music. He posts every Thursday morning.