Recently switched internet providers and the fiber connection itself has been great, but I’m confused by the WiFi on the supplied router.
Standing in the living room near the router everything looks perfect.
Walk into my office, which is literally one wall away, and the signal drops way more than I’d expect. Sometimes video calls are fine, sometimes they get choppy, and one corner of the room is noticeably worse than the rest.
What makes this weird is that my old router was farther away and seemed to cover this room better.
The new router is tri-band and supposedly more capable, so I expected the opposite.
Could I have a bad unit, or are there settings that can make a newer router behave worse through walls?
First question: are you measuring actual signal or just looking at the WiFi icon? Because “3 bars vs 5 bars” tells you basically nothing useful. I’d want RSSI numbers in the good spot and the bad spot before declaring the router defective.
which band? If you’re comparing old 5 GHz coverage with new 6 GHz coverage, then yeah, the newer router can absolutely look “worse” through the same wall. Higher frequency doesn’t get a free pass through building materials just because the box says WiFi 7.
@ED_Sniper Mostly 5 GHz. I tried 6 GHz too and that drops even faster, which I kind of expected. The 5 GHz behavior is the part that seems odd
I’d grab a WiFi analyzer for troubleshooting rather than trust the little signal bars. NetSpot is pretty good, but honestly use whichever one you find comfortable. Walk around the apartment and compare the 5 GHz signal near the router, along the path to the office, and in the bad corner. Also check whether your channel is packed with neighboring networks. That’ll tell you a lot more than “the router says 100% power”.
What width is it using? Some ISP gateways ship with 160 MHz enabled because that makes the spec sheet look sexy. In a dense apartment building I’d rather have a stable 80 MHz, or even 40 if the RF environment is ugly, than chase max theoretical throughput.
@SwitchLurker Width isn’t going to explain the signal physically dropping off a cliff behind one wall though.
This is why I hate debugging WiFi in apartments.
You can have:
“bad placement”
“bad channel”
“bad wall”
“bad client”
“bad router”
all producing basically the same sentence from the user:
“WiFi sucks in my office”.
Measure first. Then accuse the hardware.