16 Jun 2026 · 8 min read
Fixing Wi-Fi dead zones without a faster plan
If one room is bad and the rest is fine, upgrading your plan cannot help. Here is how to work out what is actually wrong.
The most common thing we are asked to fix is described as "slow internet", and in most cases the internet is not slow. The connection arriving at the house is fine and the Wi-Fi distributing it is not. Those are different problems with different fixes, and only one of them is solved by paying your provider more.
The one test that tells you which problem you have
Before anything else, do this. It takes five minutes and it determines everything that follows.
- Plug a laptop into the router with an ethernet cable
- Run a speed test
- Now unplug the cable, stand next to the router on Wi-Fi, and run it again
- Now go to the room that has problems and run it a third time
- Cable is slow too
- The problem is your connection or your plan. That is a conversation with your provider, and no equipment you buy will fix it.
- Cable is fast, Wi-Fi beside the router is slow
- The router itself is the problem — either old, overloaded, or badly configured.
- Both fast near the router, slow in one room
- A coverage problem. This is the most common result by a distance, and it is entirely fixable.
Why signal dies where it does
Wi-Fi is radio, and radio is stopped by specific things. Once you know what they are, dead zones stop being mysterious.
- Water absorbs it — which includes people, fish tanks, and hot water systems
- Metal reflects it — foil-backed insulation, steel studs, roller doors, filing cabinets
- Masonry attenuates it heavily — double brick internal walls are much worse than plasterboard
- Distance — signal falls off sharply, and the marketing range figures assume open air
- Other networks — in units and townhouses, neighbouring Wi-Fi competing on the same channel
The foil-backed sarking in modern Australian homes deserves special mention. It is excellent at reflecting heat, and it is nearly as good at reflecting Wi-Fi, which is why a brand-new house often has worse coverage than a draughty old one.
Fixes, from free to expensive
Move the router (free)
The single most under-used fix. Routers usually sit where the NBN box was installed, which is wherever the builder ran conduit — commonly a front study, a garage, or a corner of the house nobody sits in.
Signal spreads outward in roughly a sphere, so a router in the corner of the house wastes most of its coverage on the neighbours and the street. Central and high is what you want, out in the open rather than inside a cabinet or behind a television.
Change the channel (free)
In apartments and townhouses, interference from neighbouring networks is a real cause of poor performance. Most routers pick a channel automatically at startup and then never reconsider. Forcing a less congested channel in the router settings can make a noticeable difference for nothing.
Use the 5GHz band properly (free)
Modern routers broadcast on two bands. 2.4GHz travels further and through more walls but is slower and more congested; 5GHz is much faster but does not penetrate as well. If your router presents them as two separate network names, devices in the same room as the router should be on 5GHz and distant devices on 2.4GHz.
A mesh system ($150–250 installed)
Two or three units broadcasting one network, handing your device between them as you move. This is the right answer for most homes with a genuine coverage problem.
The handover is the point. A cheap range extender creates a second network — usually with "-EXT" appended — and your phone clings stubbornly to the weak original signal rather than switching. That is why extenders so often appear to do nothing.
A wired access point (best result where possible)
If there is ethernet cabling in the walls, or a cable can be run, an access point at the far end of the house beats any wireless solution. Each mesh node that relays wirelessly loses roughly half the available throughput; a wired one loses none.
Things that will not help
- A faster plan, when the problem is coverage — the most common wasted spend
- Range extenders, for the handover reason above
- Powerline adapters across different circuits — they need both ends on the same electrical circuit, which is rarely true across a whole house and almost never true in a workshop or shed
- A more powerful router, because transmit power is capped by regulation and the difference between models is far smaller than the marketing suggests
When it is genuinely your connection
Sometimes the cable test comes back slow, and then it really is the line. If you are on FTTN — fibre to a street cabinet, copper for the last stretch — the length and condition of that copper sets your ceiling, and no equipment in your house changes it.
That is worth knowing before you spend anything, because it converts the problem into a provider conversation rather than a shopping trip. We test at the socket for exactly this reason. If you would like it measured properly, that is our Wi-Fi and network service.