Last time, we pulled up a chair in the lounge room and met the host of our Wi-Fi party: the Access Point, patiently giving everyone their turn to talk. Today, let's ask an important logical question: Where is the host actually standing?
Because here's the thing nobody tells you when you sign up for a shiny new NBN plan: your internet connection can be perfect, and your Wi-Fi can still feel like it's stuck in 2015, and the reason is almost never your internet plan at all. It's where your router is sitting.
The short version, if you're skimming: most slow Wi-Fi has nothing to do with your internet plan and everything to do with what's physically standing between you and your router.
The host who won't leave the study.
Imagine our host from last time, except this time they've wandered off. Instead of standing in the lounge room with everyone else, they've shut themselves in the study down the hall, door closed, and they're trying to run the conversation from in there. You can still hear them, sort of. Muffled. You catch every third word. If you want to actually join in, you're shouting back through a closed door and hoping for the best.
That, in a nutshell, is what happens to your Wi-Fi signal the moment there's something solid between you and your router. Every wall, door, floor, fridge, and fish tank between you and the Access Point is muffling the conversation a little more, and Wi-Fi has a name for it: attenuation.
Try this. Stand wherever you actually use Wi-Fi most (bed, couch, the desk you work from) and look toward wherever your router lives. What's actually in the way? A plasterboard wall? A full brick one? A floor and a ceiling, because the host's home office is upstairs and you're not? That fridge that somehow always ends up between the kitchen and everything else? The answer to "why is my Wi-Fi slow here" is usually right there in front of you.
Everything is muffling the host a little.
Plasterboard, brick, concrete, floors between levels, fridges and other large appliances, the fish tank the kids talked you into, a full bookshelf, bathroom tiles, mirrors, windows, the couch, the TV, even the people themselves (we're roughly 60% fluids, so we count too) all get in the way of a radio signal in exactly the same way a closed door gets in the way of a voice. Some muffle more than others, but nothing in your house is neutral. Everything between you and the host is making the conversation harder to hear.
The technical crowd has names for the different ways this happens: reflection, refraction, diffraction, scattering, absorption. You don't need to memorise them. You just need to know they're all doing the same basic thing, chipping away at the signal before it reaches you.
What this actually looks like at my place.
Right now I'm sitting in my lounge room, which is also where one of my Access Point lives. Nothing between us. Full signal, full speed, exactly what my internet plan promises.
Walk upstairs to my bedroom and the story changes completely. Now the signal has to fight its way through a brick wall, floorboards, carpet, and a bit of plasterboard for good measure. Each of those adds its own bit of loss: plasterboard costs you somewhere around 2dB, a brick wall closer to 4dB. Stack a few of those up between the host and you, and it adds up fast. That's why I added another Access Point and no, not mesh!!!
The simple fix (before you buy anything).
So here's the obvious move: get the host closer to the conversation! Moving your Access Point somewhere more central removes one or two walls from the equation entirely, and that alone can make a surprisingly large difference, often for free.
Now, not everyone can relocate their router. Maybe the NBN box lives in a cupboard at the front of the house and that's just where it is. But if you can move it, do that before you spend a single dollar on new hardware. It is, hands down, the highest return on effort you'll get.
Here's a second free fix while we're at it, and it takes about thirty seconds. Most home routers have three or four antennas, and almost everyone leaves them all standing straight up, simply because that's how they came out of the box. Each of those antennas actually radiates in a donut shape: strong all the way around it, but weak directly above and below wherever it's pointing. Stand three or four antennas straight up and you have three or four donuts covering the same area, which gives you excellent coverage across the floor the router's sitting on, and a noticeably weaker signal directly upstairs or downstairs from it, exactly the spot we were just complaining about. Angling one or two of those antennas over, say to 45 degrees tilts that weak spot away from straight up and down and toward the gap you actually have. It also costs nothing, and it might fix a handful of your problems.
There's one more piece of this worth knowing about, and unlike the first two, it's not something you do yourself, it's something decent routers already do in the background. It's called beamsteering, and it lets the host shape their voice toward whoever they're actually talking to instead of broadcasting the same volume in every direction at once. Think of it less as a fix you apply and more as a router that's paying attention: it won't perform miracles through three walls and a fish tank, but it does mean the signal is being directed where it needs to go.
Coming up
Getting the host into the right room is step one. Next time, we'll get into who's actually allowed to talk when, and why your router shouting on the wrong channel can be just as much of a problem as the wrong room. That's Bands & Channels (not Hamburg in the 80s...), and it's where things start to get properly technical.