The back bedroom, the shed, the office at the end of the hall. Every house in Orange seems to have one room where the Wi-Fi gives up. People ring their internet provider, get told the NBN is fine, and are left stuck. The provider is usually right: the connection into the house is fine. The problem is getting it through the house.
What is really happening
Wi-Fi is radio. The modem your provider sent you has a small antenna and sits wherever the NBN box happens to be, often in a corner of the lounge or a cupboard. Every wall it has to go through, especially brick, double-brick, rendered or anything with foil insulation, knocks the signal down. By the time it reaches the far end of the house there is not enough left to hold a steady connection, so devices drop off and reconnect. That is the dropout.
The other common cause is interference. Older houses in Orange often share the 2.4 GHz band with a neighbour’s network, a microwave, baby monitors and cordless phones. The 5 GHz band is cleaner and faster but travels a shorter distance, which is why a phone can be fine in the kitchen and useless in the garage.
What does not fix it
- Upgrading your NBN plan. A faster plan does nothing for signal that cannot reach the room.
- Cheap plug-in “Wi-Fi boosters”. These repeat a weak signal and halve its speed in the process. They sometimes make things worse.
- Restarting the modem every day. It clears the symptom for an hour.
What does fix it
- Move the modem. Free, and worth trying first. Central, high up, out of the cupboard, away from the TV and the microwave.
- A proper mesh system. Two or three units placed correctly give one seamless network across the whole house. The important part is placement; a mesh unit put where the signal is already dead cannot help.
- A cable to the far end. For a shed, a granny flat or a home office, one Ethernet cable from the modem to a wireless access point out there gives full speed with no dropouts. It is the solution we recommend most for sheds and outbuildings around Orange.
- Separating devices sensibly. Security cameras, smart plugs and printers on 2.4 GHz, phones and laptops on 5 GHz.
Business premises
For an office or shop the same rules apply, with one extra: a consumer modem is not built for twenty devices and a point-of-sale system. A small business-grade access point or two, properly cabled, is the difference between a network you forget about and one that costs you a sale every Saturday.
We design and install home and business networks across Orange and the Central West, from a single access point to a fully cabled office. See networking for what is included.
Need a hand? Tell us which room drops out and what the walls are made of, and we will suggest the cheapest fix that will actually hold. Send an enquiry or ring 0423 870 531 and we will tell you straight away whether it is a two-minute fix.