The house is fine. It is everything outside the house that is the problem. Home offices in the garage, a studio out the back, a granny flat with a tenant, a deck where you would like to watch something. All of them sit outside the range of a router that was never asked to reach that far. Why detached spaces are so difficult Two things are working against you at once. First, distance. The signal has already crossed the whole house before it gets to the back door. Second, the buildings themselves. A garage or studio has its own external walls, and those walls block the signal from getting in just as effectively as the house walls blocked it from getting out. Colorbond and metal cladding are particularly good at it, because metal reflects the signal rather than
Read more

People tend to arrive at this question already convinced of the answer. Either cabling is old-fashioned and everything is wireless now, or wireless is unreliable and everything should be wired. Both are wrong often enough that it is worth working through properly. What cabling actually does Cabling does two jobs, and only one of them is what people expect. The obvious one is giving a device a fast, stable, private connection. A cabled TV or computer is not competing with anything and is not affected by walls or distance. The less obvious job, and the more important one in most homes, is feeding access points. When you run a cable to a second point in the house and put an access point there, that access point broadcasts at full strength from a good location. Without a cable it
Read more

You upgraded the plan. The bill went up. The internet feels exactly the same. This is one of the most common frustrations we hear, and the explanation is fairly simple once you know where the number on your plan is actually measured. Where the number comes from Your plan speed describes what arrives at your modem. It is not a promise about what arrives at your laptop on the back deck. Between those two points sits your WiFi, every other device in the house, and the equipment you are using. Speed gets lost at each stage. Upgrading the plan raises the ceiling. It does nothing about the things underneath it. If the room you use is already the bottleneck, a faster plan changes nothing you can feel. Loss point one: the WiFi itself Even in ideal conditions you
Read more

Older homes in this part of Sydney are solid. Thick walls, proper masonry, built to last. They are also, from a WiFi point of view, close to worst case. If you have moved from a newer build into an older home and your WiFi suddenly stopped working properly, nothing is broken. The building changed. Why brick is such a problem WiFi travels as a radio signal, and dense materials absorb it. Plasterboard costs you very little signal. Timber, glass and standard doors are manageable. Brick is where it gets serious, because the material is dense and the signal has to pass through the full thickness of it. One brick wall between the router and your device makes a noticeable difference. Two or three and you are into dead zone territory. Double brick is a different level again A
Read more

Every house has one. The back bedroom, the study at the end of the hall, the granny flat, the room where video calls go to die. It is never random. It is physics, and once you understand what is happening the fix becomes obvious. What is actually happening to the signal WiFi is a radio signal. It gets weaker with distance, and it gets weaker again every time it passes through something solid. Plasterboard barely slows it down. Timber is fine. Brick takes a real bite out of it. Double brick, concrete, tiled bathrooms, mirrors and metal appliances take a serious bite. Stack three or four of those between your router and your phone and there is very little left by the time it arrives. This is why the far room problem is so much worse in older
Read more

Slow internet feels like one problem. It is usually two, and they get fixed in completely different ways. Your NBN connection is the service coming into your house. Your WiFi is how that service travels around inside your house. When people ring their provider about slow internet, most of the time the provider is delivering exactly what was ordered. The speed is being lost somewhere between the modem and the couch. Working out which one you have takes about five minutes. The quickest test: plug in a cable Run a speed test on your phone in the room where the internet feels worst. Write the number down. Now plug a laptop directly into the modem with an Ethernet cable and run the same test. If the cabled result is close to what you pay for, your NBN connection
Read more