Where to Put Your Router

Central, as high as practical, out in the open, and away from metal and water. That is the whole rule. The rest of this page is why each part of it matters, and what to do when the cable comes into the worst possible corner of the house — which it usually does.

Why placement matters more than the hardware

A router radiates outward in roughly a flattened sphere. Put it in the middle of the house and most of that sphere lands inside the house. Put it in a corner and a large fraction of it lands outside, warming the garden. You have not lost a little coverage; you have thrown away a quarter or more of the router's total output before any wall gets involved.

Then add the walls. Signal loss through material compounds — two brick walls are much worse than one, not twice as bad. Moving the router so a typical path crosses one wall instead of three is often worth more than upgrading from Wi-Fi 6 to Wi-Fi 7, and it is free.

The rules, in order of how much they matter

1. As central as the cable allows

Think in three dimensions. In a two-story house, the best single position is usually near the middle of the footprint on the upper floor, or on a high shelf on the ground floor, because radio travels through a wooden floor more happily than along a hallway through four stud walls.

2. Up off the floor

Waist height minimum, shoulder height is better. Furniture, appliances and people all absorb signal, and they are all at floor level. A router on carpet behind a sofa is transmitting into the sofa.

3. Out in the open, not in a cupboard

Cupboards, media cabinets, TV units with a glass door and a metal frame, and the boiler closet are all bad. Two are worse than they look: a media cabinet stacked with other electronics is both an RF-noisy and a partially metallic enclosure, and a boiler or hot water cylinder is a large tank of water, which is one of the strongest absorbers in the house.

4. Away from these six things specifically

• Microwave ovens. They operate in the same 2.4 GHz region and leak enough to matter while running.
• Cordless phone bases and older baby monitors. Many sit squarely on 2.4 GHz and transmit continuously.
• Large mirrors. A mirror is a sheet of metal behind glass, and it reflects radio as effectively as it reflects light.
• Fridges, washing machines, filing cabinets, safes. Big metal boxes make sharp shadows.
• Aquariums and water tanks. Water absorbs strongly.
• Other routers, including the neighbors'. If your router sits against a shared wall with theirs on the other side, both of you lose.

5. Antennas: vertical for one floor, splayed for two

An antenna radiates in a doughnut shape around its own axis, strongest perpendicular to it and weakest off the tip. So a vertical antenna covers a single floor well and the floor above poorly. If you need both, set some antennas vertical and angle others out to 45 degrees or flat. On a router with internal antennas you have no such control, which is part of why placement matters even more on those.

The best place for a router in a two-story house

If the choice is between a ground-floor corner and an upstairs landing, the landing usually wins, and by a lot. Two reasons. First, the signal then travels down through a floor to reach the ground floor and up through a floor to reach the top, so no room is more than one floor away. Second, an upstairs landing is typically closer to the geometric center of the building than any downstairs room.

The obstacle is that the cable enters at ground level. Your options, best first: run one Ethernet cable up to the landing and put the router there; leave the modem downstairs and put a wired access point on the landing; or accept the ground-floor position and add coverage upstairs. There is a page specifically on that last case: Wi-Fi that will not reach upstairs, and one on the house shape generally in Wi-Fi for a two-story house.

When the cable enters the worst possible place

This is extremely common and it has a clean answer: separate the modem from the Wi-Fi. Leave the modem or gateway where the cable arrives, put the router or the first mesh node somewhere sensible, and connect the two with a single cable. If you cannot run one, your house may already have a suitable path — existing coax outlets can carry network traffic with a MoCA or powerline adapter, and the coax option in particular is both fast and shielded.

This also explains why knowing the difference between a modem and a router is practically useful rather than pedantic: once you see them as two jobs, it becomes obvious that only one of them has to live by the wall socket.

How to check that your move worked

Take the readings before you move anything, move it, then take the same readings from the same spots — the method is in room-by-room testing. Look for a change in the worst room specifically. A placement change that improves the good rooms and not the bad one has not helped you.