Poor WiFi coverage after Full Fibre install

[Martin3780]

We had Full Fibre 150 installed yesterday. The WiFi signal now doesn't cover the whole house because the router is now positioned less centrally. I had hoped the latest TT router might do the job - but no. It's  a Sagemcom 5464. What can we do to get better WiFi coverage? 

[Martin3780]

Keith,  Thanks. We've been experimenting over the last few days. Moving our WiFi channel to avoid the neighbours makes no difference to our ability to connect on the other side of the house. Not surprisingly, if we disable 5GHz Wifi and make our phones/tablets connect to 2.4GHz, things are slightly better in the more remote rooms. Where we were getting no 5GHz signal before, we can connect to 2.4GHz slightly more reliably and get speeds of around 10Mbps....but then the speed of devices near the router suffers. We're on Fibre 150 and get speeds 40-50Mbps on 2.4GHz near the router. I'm still certain that it's our internal walls that are the main problem. It's not a surprise - they had a big impact when the router was more central in the house before the fibre was installed.

I've hunted about in the old and new Sagemcom routers' GUI and cannot find any way to use an old router as a bridge. It looks like that isn't an option. Next job is to see what TalkTalk can offer to help us set up a mesh on 5Ghz. 

Thanks for your help.

Martin

[KeithFrench]

You say that you can't be suffering from WiFi interference, which can change by the minute, yet you said your neighbour is on the same channel as you. That is exactly what I was talking about. 

[Martin3780]

Just another idea : does anyone kniw whether I can use my old SAgemcom 5364 as a WiFi extender? Looks like I'd need to put set bridge mode. Can this be done with these TT routers or have TT disabled it?

[Martin3780]

Thanks for your reply. I doubt that the problem is interference since we've had TT broadband (most recently with Sagemcom 5364) for many years in a central location within the house and have had OK coverage everywhere. I think the problem is with our internal walls and the bricks/blocks they are made of.  The rooms that get no WiFi today now have an additional wall between them and the router because of where the fibre entered the house. Using a WiFi analyser on my phone I can see we have neighbours using the same wifi channels = channel 11 on 2.4GHZ and channel 36 on 5Ghz. Is it worth switching channels to get away from them?

Sadly, we need a phone landline at the moment. Otherwise I'd be asking TT to swap routers to an eero 6 and then get one/two eero 6 extenders for a mesh.

Martin

[KeithFrench]

You may need the Sagemcom FAST 266 WiFi Booster to combine with your 5464 to form a mesh network. However, I need to check out that this is not caused by WiFi interference first.

Slow speed, intermittent dropouts, breaks in the signal or no signal on some or all devices or no internet access might be caused by Wi-Fi interference from other local networks, which can also lead to a permanent reduction in speed. No ISP can be responsible for your local environment, this is mainly a byproduct of the popularity of Wi-Fi.

Generally speaking, the 2.4GHz band suffers a lot more from interference than the much faster 5GHz band, but the 2.4GHz one can sometimes have a better range, but this all depends on your local area.

In other words, I try to help you optimise your Wi-Fi connection. The next stage involves sending out a guide to you to help you get me some important diagnostic results so that I can analyse them for you and recommend changes to your router configuration to solve them.

I only send this out to people who request it.