Slow Wi-Fi is usually a placement problem masquerading as a speed problem. People pay for faster broadband and see no improvement, because the bottleneck was never the connection — it was the radio environment inside the house.
Work through these before spending anything. Roughly two thirds of the homes we survey need no new hardware at all.
Move the router first
- Get it out of the cupboard. Enclosed spaces, especially metal ones, absorb the signal badly.
- Raise it up. Signal spreads outward and slightly downward; at floor level you lose half the house.
- Move it away from the microwave, cordless phone base and baby monitor — all of which share the 2.4GHz band.
- Move it towards the centre of the house. A router in a corner sends much of its signal to next door.
- Keep it away from fish tanks and radiators. Water and metal both block Wi-Fi effectively.
Then check the channel
In a street of houses, everyone’s router often defaults to the same few channels, and they interfere with each other. Most routers can scan and select a clearer channel from their settings page. In one Princeton house we surveyed, four neighbours shared the customer’s channel; changing it alone doubled kitchen throughput.
Why extenders often make things worse
Cheap extenders rebroadcast a weak signal, halving throughput, and frequently create a second network your devices cling to long after they should have switched back. We have removed more extenders than we have installed. One family had bought two, both of which were actively harming coverage.
If you genuinely need more coverage, a mesh system with a wired connection to the main node is the right answer. But measure first — buying hardware to fix a placement problem is money spent on the wrong thing.