Where to put your router, and why it matters more than your plan

The line and the Wi-Fi are two different things

Your plan describes what arrives at the router. Wi-Fi describes what happens after that, and it is governed by walls, distance and interference rather than by what you pay. This is why upgrading a plan often does not fix weak Wi-Fi: the problem was signal, not bandwidth.

Test it before you spend anything. Plug a laptop into the router with a cable and run a speed test. If the wired result matches your plan, the rest of this guide is the useful part.

Five things that usually help

• Central and reasonably high. Wi-Fi spreads outward and slightly downward. A router on a shelf near the middle of the flat generally beats one on the floor in a corner.
• Out in the open. Inside a cabinet or behind a television costs you signal.
• Away from the microwave. Microwaves and the metal around them sit close to the 2.4GHz band.
• Count walls, not metres. A light partition costs little. A reinforced concrete wall or a lift shaft costs a great deal.
• Antennas upright for a single floor. Angle one outward only if you are trying to cover two levels.

2.4GHz and 5GHz

Most routers broadcast both, and they behave differently.

5GHz is faster and travels less well through walls. It suits anything in the same or an adjacent room: the TV, a work laptop, a console.

2.4GHz is slower but reaches further and penetrates better. It suits the far bedroom, a balcony camera and small smart-home devices that only need a trickle.

When both bands share one network name, the device chooses for you, and it often stays on whichever it joined first even after you move rooms. Giving them separate names is fiddly for an afternoon and helpful afterwards. Whether your particular router allows that depends on the model; ask support if you are not sure.

When placement is not enough

In a long flat, or one with a concrete core in the middle, a single router may genuinely not cover everything. In rough order of preference: a cable to a second access point, a mesh node, and last a repeater, which trades throughput for coverage.

Things that generally do not help

Changing the plan when the wired speed is already correct. Buying a router with more antennas but leaving it in the same bad spot. Foil behind the antenna. Channel-changing apps are the exception: in a tower with many competing networks, changing channel on 2.4GHz sometimes does help.

If the wired speed is right and the Wi-Fi is not, the answer is usually in the room rather than in the plan.