Clients and associates often experience issues with weak wireless wi-fi signal strength throughout their offices and homes.
“But I don’t live in a mansion! My router’s only 5 metres away from my lounge room” is a common complaint. This helpful animation shows how Wi-Fi signals flow through an apartment or house much like water. The signal has a difficult time in penetrating walls, instead it flows down the hallway and into other rooms. By the time it flows from your kitchen bench, down the hall and into the study; the signal has lost most of it’s strength.
Some hints on maximising your wireless strength:
- Place your wireless router in a central and open location. Placing it inside a cupboard at the far end of your house is no good.
- Log into your router’s admin page and see if there’s an option to increase the signal strength. Some routers have the ability to increase the strength.
- Failing this, you might need to get a bit technical and purchase an additional good quality router or wireless access point. This can be a bit tricky and depends a lot on the hardware you have, but it is by far the BEST method. You can then:
- Connect your existing router to the new router/access point via an Ethernet cable.
- Configure the new router/access point to work in “bridged” mode so it is then re-broadcasting the “Internet” signal given to it from the original router via the connected Ethernet cable.
- Give the wireless signals on both devices (SSIDs) the same name. So then when you move from room to room your device will automatically “switch” to the signal with the highest strength.
How else to deal with a weak wireless Wi-Fi signal strength?
So that’s a bit complicated? There are some other “off the shelf” options such as “wireless extenders” which may help in a pinch, but I’d personally save your money. A better budget option would be Ethernet over Power which can work straight out of the box or may require some frustrating configuration. This will often solve weak wireless wi-fi signal strength
If all else fails, give us a call!