Extender, mesh, or move the router? Work it out in an afternoon

Nearly every house has one. The back bedroom where video calls freeze. The kitchen where a podcast stutters if you stand near the fridge. The usual response is to buy something — an extender, a mesh kit, a router with more antennas — and hope. Sometimes that works. Often it moves the problem two meters and costs a hundred dollars.

Half an hour of testing tells you which of three things is actually wrong, and only one of them is solved by hardware. The other two are free.

First, separate the internet from the wifi

These are different problems that feel identical. Wifi is the link between your device and the router. The internet is everything past it. If the connection is slow everywhere, including in the router's own room, the wifi is probably fine and the line into the house is the issue — a different conversation, usually with your provider.

Test it this way. Run a speed test on a laptop plugged into the router, or standing right next to it if you have no cable. Note the number, then run the same test in the bad room. If the wired number is low, stop reading about mesh systems. If it is good and the far-room number collapses, you have a coverage problem and the rest of this is for you.

Run the bad-room test twice, too — once mid-morning and once in the evening. A signal that is fine at ten in the morning and unusable at nine at night is not a range problem. It is congestion, either from your own household or from every neighbor's router competing for the same slice of air.

Then look at where the router actually is

Routers get installed wherever the cable enters the building, which is almost never where you want the signal. On the floor of a hallway closet, behind a closed door, under the breaker panel — that is the standard arrangement, and roughly the worst one available.

Wifi radiates outward in a rough doughnut, weakest directly above and below the router. It passes through drywall and wood happily, struggles with brick and plaster, and is stopped cold by metal, mirrors, concrete, and water. A fish tank between the router and the sofa is a genuine wall. So is a fridge or a mirrored wardrobe door.

• Get the router off the floor and out of the closet — waist height or higher, in the open.
• Aim for the middle of the area you use, not the middle of the floor plan. If the far end is a garage nobody sits in, ignore it.
• Keep a meter between the router and anything large and metal, and never behind a television.
• Point antennas, if it has them, in different planes — some vertical, some angled — rather than all straight up.

Moving a router two rooms and up onto a shelf routinely does more than any accessory you can buy. Try that first.

Understand the bands you are already paying for

Modern routers broadcast on more than one frequency band, and the bands behave very differently. The 2.4 GHz band travels furthest and passes through walls best, but it is slow by current standards and shared with cordless phones, baby monitors, older smart plugs, and every neighbor within range. The 5 GHz band is much faster and less crowded, but it fades sooner and loses more through solid walls. Newer routers add a 6 GHz band: faster and cleaner still, shorter-ranged again.

The practical consequence: distance is a trade against speed. A device three rooms away is often better off on slow, stable 2.4 GHz than clinging to a 5 GHz signal that keeps dropping. Routers usually make that choice for you and usually get it right. When they don't, splitting the bands into separately named networks lets you pin a stubborn device where you want it.

If your problem is evening congestion rather than distance, changing channel is the free fix. On 2.4 GHz only three channels don't overlap each other — 1, 6, and 11 — so if you and two neighbors are all on 6, you are all taking turns. Most routers will scan and pick a quieter one from the admin page. Two minutes, and it occasionally solves the whole thing.

Now decide what, if anything, to buy

If the dead spot survives a better router position and a channel change, you need to put a second radio closer to it. There are three ways, and they are not equal.

A plug-in extender

Cheapest, and the one most likely to disappoint. A basic extender receives on the same radio it retransmits with, so it spends half its airtime listening and half talking, and throughput past it is roughly halved. It also needs a strong signal itself, so it belongs halfway to the dead room, not in it. Plugged in where reception is already poor, it rebroadcasts a bad signal and nothing more.

A mesh system

Two or three units that cooperate, hand devices between themselves, and present one network name. Better ones keep a radio in reserve just for talking to each other, which avoids the halving problem. This is the right answer for most awkward houses. The point of it is coverage, not speed — a mesh will not make your internet faster, it will make it reach the room.

A wire

The unglamorous best option. Run an ethernet cable to the far end of the house and put a second access point — or one node of a mesh kit — on the end of it. Every wireless problem downstream of that cable disappears, because the hard part of the journey is now made of copper. If a cable can be run along a baseboard with an hour of effort, it beats anything you can buy that does the job over the air.

The same logic applies at the device end. Anything that sits in one place and moves a lot of data — a desktop, a television, a games console — is better off wired, and every device you take off the air leaves more of it for the ones that need it.

The maintenance nobody does

A router is a small computer facing the open internet that runs for years without anyone looking at it. While you are in the admin page anyway: change the administrator password if it is still the one on the sticker, and check that firmware updates install automatically. If the manufacturer has stopped issuing updates for your model, that is a real reason to replace it — not for speed, but because nothing else in the house is that exposed.

And write the wifi password somewhere other than the back of the router, because the day you move it to that better position is the day you find the sticker has worn off.