Slow Wi-Fi is usually blamed on the internet provider, and it usually is not their fault. The connection arriving at your building and the connection reaching your laptop are two different things, and most of the loss happens inside your own walls.
Find out which half is broken
Run a speed test twice: once on a device connected by cable to the router, once on Wi-Fi in the room where it feels slow.
If the cable is fast and the Wi-Fi is slow, it is your network and everything below applies. If both are slow, the problem is the line into the building and it belongs to your provider. This one test saves most people an afternoon.
The router is in the wrong place
Routers get installed wherever the cable enters the building, which is typically a hallway, a cupboard or behind the television. All three are bad.
Wi-Fi radiates outward in all directions, so a router in a corner sends most of its signal into the street. Central, high and in the open is the goal. Moving it onto a shelf instead of the floor is often the single largest improvement available, and it costs nothing.
Keep it away from anything with a motor or a heating element, and well away from microwaves, which broadcast noise across the same frequencies. Thick masonry, foil-backed insulation and anything containing water, including large aquariums and people, all absorb signal.
You are on the wrong band
Modern routers broadcast on two or three bands, and they behave very differently.
- 2.4GHz travels a long way and passes through walls, but is slow and shares its space with cordless phones, baby monitors, Bluetooth and every neighbour.
- 5GHz is much faster and far less congested, but weakens quickly through walls.
- 6GHz, on newer equipment, is faster still and almost empty, with even shorter range.
Devices choose for themselves and frequently choose badly. A laptop that connected to 2.4GHz in the far bedroom will often stay on it after you carry it back beside the router.
Toggling Wi-Fi off and on forces a fresh choice. If your router presents both bands under one name, that is usually fine; if it lets you split them into separate names, doing so gives you manual control.
Everyone nearby is on the same channel
In a block of flats, twenty routers may all be sitting on the default channel, taking turns to talk and waiting on each other.
A Wi-Fi analyser app shows which channels are crowded. On 2.4GHz only channels 1, 6 and 11 avoid overlapping, so pick whichever of those three is quietest. On 5GHz there are far more channels and congestion is rarer.
Many routers select automatically at boot and then never reconsider, so a simple restart can move you to a clearer channel.
One device is consuming everything
Check the connected devices list in your router’s settings. Most people find several they cannot identify, and occasionally something genuinely saturating the connection: a console downloading a large update, a computer uploading a backup, or a security camera streaming constantly.
Uploads matter more than people expect. On many connections the upload capacity is a fraction of the download, and one device saturating it makes everything else feel broken even though downloads look fine.
The equipment is simply old
A router supplied five or more years ago may not support the standards your devices expect, and it becomes the ceiling for everything in the house no matter how fast the line is.
Providers rarely upgrade equipment unless asked. It is worth asking, since many will replace an old unit free.
What actually fixes a large or awkward home
Range extenders are the popular answer and the weakest one. Most halve throughput, because they receive and retransmit on the same radio, and they often create a second network your devices cling to at low signal.
A mesh system is the right answer for a house that one router cannot cover. Several units cooperate under a single network name and hand devices between them properly.
Better still, run a cable to anything that does not move. A television, a desktop or a console on ethernet is both faster and one fewer device competing for the air.
Join the discussion