LMC Tech
Problem solved
Before you buy anything, move the router.
The free fixes people skip, and how to work out whether you need an extender, mesh, or a cable.
The problem
Usually position, sometimes construction
Everywhere in the house is fine except the back bedroom, the garden office, or the kitchen. In that one room everything buffers.
- Routers are frequently installed wherever the phone socket happens to be, which is often a hallway cupboard, behind a boiler, or on the floor. All three are close to worst-case.
- Wi-Fi weakens with distance and with every wall. Solid brick, stone, foil-backed insulation and old plaster with metal lath are all substantially worse than modern stud walls.
- 5GHz is much faster than 2.4GHz but travels less far through walls. A device clinging to 5GHz at the edge of range performs worse than it would on 2.4GHz.
- Big metal objects matter more than people expect. A router behind a fridge, a filing cabinet or a mirror is being deliberately blocked.
- One device being slow while everything else is fine in the same room is a different problem entirely: that is the device's own aerial, not your coverage.
The fix
Free things first, then spend
Cheapest and most effective first. A surprising amount of this costs nothing at all, which is not what most sites selling you things will tell you.
- Move the router higher and more central, out of the cupboard. Free, and frequently the entire fix.
- Get it away from the microwave, cordless phone base and fish tank. All genuinely interfere with 2.4GHz.
- Point the aerials differently if it has them. Vertical for the same floor, one horizontal helps upstairs.
- Still bad in one room only: an extender is the cheap fix, but understand that a single-radio one roughly halves throughput.
- Patchy in several rooms: mesh, ideally tri-band, and wire a node back to the router if you can reach it.
- Thick walls or a large house: Ethernet to a wired access point. Nothing else really solves it.
Refurbished
Be careful with used networking kit
Buying used is often the best value in tech, and occasionally a terrible idea. Which one it is depends entirely on the category.
Amazon Resale store- Business access points are decent used buys, provided you can still get firmware updates for them. Security matters here and an abandoned model is a liability.
- Avoid used consumer routers and extenders. They are cheap new, frequently on old firmware, and occasionally still carrying the previous owner's configuration.
Honesty note
How to actually find refurbished stock.
Worth knowing, because it is not obvious and we checked: you cannot filter an Amazon search to refurbished items from a link. We tried every documented approach and each one quietly returned ordinary new products instead.
The used and refurbished offers live on the individual product page, under the buying box, as "Other sellers" or "Used" options. Find the item you want first, then look there. The Amazon Resale storefront above is the other way in.
Who is telling you this
We fix this sort of thing for a living.
LMC Tech builds websites, software platforms and AI-readiness work, and supports the technology behind them. These pages exist because we answer the same questions repeatedly, and writing them down is quicker than repeating ourselves.
- Our work and portfolio, including Time Out Recovery, Echo Moon Western and LODORi.
- Web and software development: Django platforms and custom builds.
- IT support: the day job behind these opinions.
- The full Wi-Fi coverage guide.
- All the problems we have written up.
Rather not do it yourself?
We can just sort it.
Across Lincolnshire and remotely. If you would rather someone specified it, fitted it and made sure it works, that is the day job.