Is your WiFi connection more or less stable depending on location or even unavailable in some rooms where it is still necessary, like your bedroom or patio? It’s probably time to review the location you’ve chosen for your box. WiFi waves do not have superpowers: they propagate more or less well depending on the materials to be traversed. In addition, the characteristics of the antenna greatly affect the way the signal is broadcast.
Check that your WiFi is configured correctly
Before going any further, connect to your router and check that the WiFi connection is configured correctly. Many times – this is especially true for the city – your neighbors’ boxes can affect your box’s signal, so even if you complete the steps in this tutorial, you won’t be able to improve the strength and stability of your wireless connection.
For him:
- Use this tutorial to check which channels are most used in your immediate environment
- Connect to your router using this tutorial
- Go to your box’s WiFi settings
- Change your link’s channel to a rarely used channel
Make a plan of your house and mark partitions, load-bearing walls and metal frames.
One aspect that is often overlooked by users is to consider the surrounding building materials. It is very important to know which walls your WiFi signal can easily pass through, which walls it may reflect, or will become very weak. Panel “Place your router in the middle of your house” outdated and in most cases will not satisfy you.
So partitions are usually transparent to WiFi waves. But load-bearing walls tend to weaken the signal, especially if reinforced with metal reinforcement. A thick wall with metal can completely block the WiFi signal from passing to the other side. In other cases, a metal wall can paradoxically cause a stronger signal in another part of the house because metal tends to reflect WiFi waves.
A few other materials can affect the signal. Water absorbs up to 95% of WiFi waves; therefore, a damp wall may block the signal more than a dry wall*. Bricks and concrete also tend to absorb a lot of signals if they are thick enough. Windows, on the other hand, is normally transparent to WiFi waves, but heat can slightly change this feature.
Once this data is in your plan, you can already carry out the initial optimization of the location, which will avoid the most obvious obstacles and, if necessary, play with the reflective property of metallic materials. If your home has several floors, it’s probably wise to place your box upstairs as best you can in terms of materials that make up the walls, and the floor itself. However, this advice does not apply if your floor is very thick (and/or has a metal frame).
If you’re on a floor, choose a slightly higher location (not directly on the floor) and above all, don’t hide your box behind books or objects (especially metal) that will disrupt the signal. The box indeed radiates the signal in all directions, and a little height can sometimes gain some coverage.
* To be fully detailed about water, it is worth noting that the human body, which is mainly composed of water, also stops WiFi waves. This might explain why your connection drops when you accept people at home (even if they don’t necessarily connect their devices to your WiFi). If you are in this situation, we recommend investing in repeaters.
Make a “heatmap” by A+B to verify that the new location improves things
The map of your house will still be useful for you. Grab some red, orange, and yellow crayons (or any other gradient you like) and use this tutorial to accurately measure WiFi signal strength in different locations. Then roughly color the fields according to the signal strength.
The purpose of this cartography, which our Anglo-Saxon friends call a “heat map,” is to visualize otherwise invisible waves. You will immediately see the strengths and weaknesses of your new position.
Support your router with repeaters and access points
Depending on your home’s configuration as well as its size, you may find that you are reaching the limits of what your router can do. If so, there are solutions:
- WiFi repeaters : These capture your box’s wireless signal and repeat it at maximum power. This can be effective at increasing signal strength, but does not always improve connection quality in our tests. Therefore, we recommend the following options instead.
- Repeaters / Access Points with PLC : same type of device but instead of connecting to your box in WiFi these devices use line carrier current which makes it possible to get a better quality connection.
- Repeaters / Access Points with Ethernet : same thing here, except that the connection to the router is done directly via an ethernet cable. Depending on your home, this can be a viable or extremely burdensome option. Still, it is this kind of device that offers the best power and connection quality upon arrival.
Caution, several things should be considered before choosing a repeater or access point. First, most of these devices limit your data rate to 100 Mbit/s (because they accept “Fast Ethernet” input at 100 Mbit/s). If you have faster access, you probably want to avoid this inconvenience: you should know that repeaters and access points with a Gigabit Ethernet port are not legionnaires and are usually very poorly indicated on the packaging. An example of this type of fast device is TP-Link RE650 (€89).
Alongside these solutions are network access point constellations (Mesh) that are supposed to improve connectivity – but we haven’t been able to test any of them yet to confirm this. Also, their configuration, especially channel selection, should not be neglected so as not to cause additional coverage problems.
Did this tutorial help you? Suggestions for improvement? Share your views in the comments.
