Fix My Wi-Fi

Every page in this section starts with a symptom and ends with a named fix. That is deliberate, and it is the opposite of how most Wi-Fi advice is organized. The usual approach is to hand you a product category and let you work out whether it applies to your house. This section works the other way: tell us what is actually going wrong, and we will tell you what causes it, how to confirm it, and what to do — including the times when the right answer costs nothing.

Why diagnosis comes before shopping

Almost all home Wi-Fi complaints fall into four buckets, and they need four different responses. Buying for the wrong bucket is the most common expensive mistake in this whole category, and it is very easy to make because the symptoms overlap.

• Coverage. The signal does not reach somewhere. The answer is another radio closer to that place — a mesh node, an access point, sometimes just moving the router. A faster router does nothing, because range has not improved across recent Wi-Fi generations.
• Congestion. The signal is strong and the speeds are bad, usually worse in the evening. The answer is a different channel or a different band. Adding radios makes this slightly worse, not better.
• Capacity. The router or the modem cannot carry what you are paying for. The answer is new hardware, and which box to replace depends on a single test with an Ethernet cable.
• Reliability. It works and then it does not. The answer is usually a tired router, a failing line, or one badly behaved device — and those are three different fixes.

The pages below are arranged by symptom precisely because you can recognize a symptom without knowing any networking vocabulary. Pick the one that sounds like your house.

How to read the numbers you just took

If the speed beside the router is close to what you pay for and the speed in the bad room is a fraction of it, you have a coverage problem. If both numbers are low, the problem is upstream of your Wi-Fi — the router, the modem, or the line, and the slow-everywhere page separates those with one more test. If the signal is strong everywhere and the speeds are still bad, that is congestion, and the interference page is where to go. And if the numbers look fine but the experience does not, the problem is reliability rather than performance — start with the dropping page.

One useful threshold to keep in mind while you walk around: −67 dBm of signal strength is the conventional floor for reliable real-time traffic such as a video call. It is a far more useful design target than any coverage figure printed on a box, and the testing guide shows you how to read it on a phone.

What we will tell you not to buy

A fair amount, honestly. A mesh system will not fix a congestion problem. A Wi-Fi 7 router will not fix a dead zone. A faster internet plan will not fix a room that is getting a tenth of your current plan. An extender placed in the dead zone cannot work, because an extender can only rebroadcast what it receives and in the dead zone it receives almost nothing. Each of those is a real purchase people make regularly, and each is money that buys nothing.

Where hardware genuinely is the answer, every page here ends with a specific recommendation and a link to buy it, because sending you away with "consider upgrading your equipment" is not advice. But the free fixes come first, in order, on every page.

Once you know the cause

The four product sections pick up where these pages leave off: mesh systems for whole-house coverage, routers when one better box is the answer, extenders and wired fixes for a single room, and by provider if your equipment is rented or your plan is the constraint. If you know your house better than you know the product, start at by home type instead.