Where is your router?

[Sasssquatch]

I’’m reading the list of places your router should not be:

In drawers and cupboards

Near windows and mirrors.
close to a wall
Near electronic equipment such as baby monitors, wireless phones or televisions

Place your router centrally in your home
Place your router as high as possible
Place your router in an area with no obstacles which could block the Wi-Fi signal.

so where does that leave? Dangling from the ceiling in the middle of the room? (Although then it would be close to the light and it probably wouldn’t like that either)

also worth noting the fibre enters the house on the corner nearest the road as they refused to put it further along the wall where I’d be able to comply with the instruction to place it centrally in the house.

the router came with a cable 1 metre long so can only be at the most 1m away from the wall and window so put it 1 meter away from the wall into the room?? but it should be as high as possible? So on a table? One meter in from the wall. With the cable stretching from the connection box to the table. That’s practical 🙄

oh and it needs two sockets. One for the little gray box and one for the actual router. So it must be close to two free sockets but also no more than one meter from the box (because of the cable). And not near anything electronic (are sockets electronic?)

also worth noting my upgrade was necessary as my unreliable connection was “due to environmental conditions” like living in a house with walls and windows amd doors and other electronic devices.

Ours is next to the TV in the corner of the room in the corner of the house.

It's a new build with walls made of cardboard though so we get signal throughout.

PIL on the other hand have a 18th century farmhouse and I've had to rig up a ridiculous system of signal extenders and boosters to get anywhere close to a reasonable signal in most rooms.

our house is a new build and has a built-in router in the airing cupboard! Meaning that is the only place you can plug a provider’s router in (I know, I don’t get it either but apparently it’s something to do with super fast speeds?). 6 months after moving in, our BT router MELTED….. Yes, actually bent in half

What! What did you do?

On a high shelf, close to my PC, in my office (spare bedroom).

I miss the laugh button 😅

Ours came in at the corner nearest the wall and from there gave us the wonderful 500Mbps which we had asked for... always provided that we were sitting in the hallway, or in the bath or on the downstairs loo! In the lounge it was down to about 30Mbps and in the office upstairs it was giving us similar. As for the conservatory it was giving 1Mbps. Yes, really! We rang up BT and moaned, an engineer came and looked and agreed it was affecting our speed and that it needed to be moved to somewhere more central such as the office. It took a few weeks but it was eventually moved and we are now getting around 200Mbps through most of the house. Moral, complain if you aren't getting what you are paying fore.

The routers that the service providers (BT, TalkTalk, Vodafone etc) supply are often not the greatest of devices. We switched to Starlink internet a couple of years ago and I had to buy my own router so opted for a big ugly Asus router with 6 movable antenni. It’s hidden away in a cupboard just above head height and cabled from the attic. Upgrading the router solved all of our WiFi signal issues.

I managed to get the installers to route the fibre into my "Centralised Network Communication Bunker" AKA under stairs cupboard.

As previously discussed, installers often default to the front of the house as it is easier for them, but it often results in the worst Wi-Fi coverage and a collection of hubs piled up behind the TV.

If you encounter coverage issues, you can test different locations by moving and just powering up the router. You will be able to “see” the Wi-Fi signal and its strength, but not the internet. If the coverage improves, you can then consider re-routing the connection,.
It is worth understanding that the Wi-Fi standard was not optimised for typical UK brick-built houses, which explains why we encounter issues.

When we only had 200-300 Mbps connections, power line adapters and access points (with Wi-Fi backhaul) were sufficient but now with fibre optic connections (typically > 1000 Mbps), you need Ethernet-connected access points to achieve the maximum performance... if you really want it.

I should also add while Powerline adapters can be surprisingly effective, they do have security concerns as the signals can travel outside the intended network, potentially reaching neighbouring properties or even being intercepted by someone with access to the same electrical grid, I've seen it happen. If you're involved in anything "sensitive" I would suggest looking at alternative solutions.

As we're on the subject, after years of fighting consumer-grade equipment, I started again with a Ubiquiti UniFi Gateway, (think offices and hotels etc) with wired access points, and ethernet to areas that benefit. (office, TV, CCTV etc). Wired connections up/download > 980 Mbps, and 300 - 400 Mbps on wi-fi everywhere. It's been easy to deploy and works better than anything I have used previously and wasn't that expensive compared to the amount of time wasted trying to fix previous solutions.

Our new fibre one is on the floor by the back door! It’s fine there.

Under the bed in the front bedroom. (Weirdly, we have very good signal strengh on all devices!)

We had full fibre installed a month ago and finally got rid of the landlines.

The Openreach guys were great and asked where we would like the installation box - detached house.

We decided we would like to have the box near the skirting board behind a sideboard in the corner of the sitting room - opposite corner from where the TV is situated. This was no problem even though we didn't have a double socket there. The socket is a single one behind the sofa about 10 feet away from sideboard - cable running to reach it - but we have a 10 gang surge protected extension which again was fine.

The router is now sat on the sideboard where the landline phone used to be but, as the fibre box is behind this unit and the extension gang sits underneath, we have no visible wires at all.

We also have a VPN router which sits directly behind the broadband router so can't be seen and we have a WiFi booster at the top of the stairs in a landing socket.

It all works brilliantly!

In the hall by what used to be the landline. Seems to be fine there but we don't make huge demands of it, no gaming, livestreaming etc. and only two of us.

In the bit of dead space between the top of the stairs and the landing, right in the centre of the house, on a shelf.