How to get a strong Wi-Fi signal in every room of your house

If you have Wi-Fi dead zones in your house, where your highspeed wireless broadband connection just can’t reach, that can seriously hamper your binge-watching or streaming. You don’t have to settle for patchy coverage though, and there are several ways in which you can extend the reach of your Wi-Fi.

Upgrade your router

Your available options here are going to depend on the ISP you’ve signed up with to provide your internet and the hardware setup that’s currently in place. Some companies are more picky about customers installing their own hardware than others. Your best bet is to check with the ISP or browse through a related support forum to check, and what you can do will depend on where in the world you live too. Check the specifications of your current equipment and see how much difference an upgrade is going to make.

Reposition your router

It may sound obvious, but moving your router is one of the most effective ways of improving the signal you can get around the home. Remember that most routers beam signal in all directions at once, so ideal ly you want your device f loating somewhere in the middle of your property. If that’s not practically feasible, just get it as close as you possibly can.

Today’s hardware devices do a good job of beaming out Wi-Fi signals, but they’re not perfect. Walls, floor, furniture, mirrors and metal objects all have a detrimental effect on the signal, so make some adjustments to the internal layout of your home if required.

Share Wi-Fi with the neighbours

You might find it practical to share an internet connection with those who are living around you. Still, you probably don’t want your neighbours sniffing around your files. Make sure you keep control over what they can access on your home network once they have access to your router. The network settings on your computer will let you restrict what you share with other people, but this is perhaps not something to try if you suspect there’s a teen hacker living next door.

Invest in an extender or two

There are two main approaches here: Extenders that simply repeat the original signal over a further distance (usually losing a lot of speed along the way) or powerline devices that use your home’s electrical wiring system to do the job of transferring bytes to and from your router. Of the two options, powerline networking is definitely the way to go if you can.

For those of you who absolutely must take the repeater approach, all kinds of kit are available to fit your requirements and budget, and you can even repurpose an old router together with some open source software to do the same job if you want to.