Wi-Fi setup in Lyon

That is why so many people buy a repeater that changes nothing. Wi-Fi passes badly through concrete, metal and water: a load-bearing wall, a reinforced floor, a service cupboard or a large treated-glass window stop the signal far more effectively than distance does. Two homes of identical size can call for opposite solutions.

What we do first

We measure signal strength room by room, in real conditions of use. That measurement answers three questions: where the signal collapses, why it collapses at that particular spot, and which bands are saturated by the neighbors.

It avoids two expensive mistakes: installing a repeater in an area where it will receive nothing decent to rebroadcast, and buying a multi-point system when simply moving the router would have done.

The free settings, first

Where the router sits. On the floor, in a closed cabinet, behind a TV or in the hallway of a through-plan home, it loses much of its range. Up high, in the open, as central as possible: that move alone settles an appreciable share of cases.

Separating the bands. Recent routers broadcast on 2.4 and 5 GHz under a single name. The first carries far but tops out low and is shared with every neighbor; the second is much faster but passes badly through walls. A device sitting at the edge of 5 GHz range spends its time switching between the two, which produces exactly the micro-drop-outs people describe to us.

The channel. In an apartment building, dozens of routers share the same frequencies. A channel chosen by hand, based on what the neighbors are doing, sometimes improves stability considerably.

The guest network

It is the most useful setting and the least used. It creates a second network, with its own key, giving access to the internet without giving access to your computers, your printers or your shared files.

In a home, it saves having to give your main key to every visitor - and therefore having to change it afterwards. In a shop or a practice, it keeps customers off the working network. Most routers offer it, and almost nobody switches it on.

Wi-Fi in the workplace

The needs change scale. A single access point can cover an open floor but collapses beyond around twenty simultaneous devices. Several coordinated points allow movement from one end of the premises to the other with no drop-out, which matters for mobile use - stocktaking, a mobile till, tablets.

To that add separating the uses: workstations, visitors, connected equipment. See securing a business network.

What has nothing to do with Wi-Fi

A simple test avoids a lot of pointless spending: connect a computer to the router with a cable. If the speed is just as bad there, the problem is the line or the subscription, and no wireless equipment will change anything. See our article on slow internet despite fiber.

The number of devices, the forgotten factor

People always think in terms of area to cover, rarely in terms of how many devices are connected. Yet that is often where the trouble lies. Between the computers, the family's or the team's phones, the TV, the speakers, the games console, the cameras and the connected objects, an entry-level router quickly finds itself handling thirty or forty simultaneous connections.

The symptom is distinctive: everything works in the morning and degrades in the evening, or as soon as several people are around. Clearing out the registered devices and spreading the load across the two bands is sometimes enough to settle it without buying anything.

The security of your wireless network

We always check three points: the encryption in use, which must be recent, how strong the key is, and above all the router's administration password - left at its factory value in most of the installations we take over. See also our article on finding your Wi-Fi password.