I’m on a 500 Mbps fiber plan, but WiFi around the house is all over the place. Near the router I get around 450 Mbps, while in the bedroom and home office it sometimes drops below 60. Video calls randomly freeze, and the smart TV buffers even though it shows almost full signal.
Current setup is the ISP’s WiFi 6 gateway in one corner of the living room. Around 25–30 devices connected between two people working from home, phones, tablets, cameras, and other smart home stuff.
I was about to buy a “gaming” router, but now I’m wondering if that would actually change anything. What upgrade genuinely solved this for you?
An expensive router won’t save you if it’s in the middle of nowhere. Yours is currently stuck in a corner, so half the WiFi is simply escaping into the street.
Before you buy new hardware, check what the real problem is: Weak signal due to walls, Interference (neighboring networks clog the airwaves), The provider’s router/modem simply dies under the load.
Various fixes are needed here, so don’t rush to waste your budget.
Run a WiFi survey first. NetSpot is pretty useful for this because you can walk around with a laptop and create a heatmap instead of guessing from the WiFi bars. Check the signal map, SIR/channel overlap, and run active speed tests in the rooms where it drops. You might find that moving the existing gateway two meters solves more than buying a $300 router.
Honestly, the best “router upgrade” I ever made was adding a wired access point upstairs. One monster router trying to cover the entire house is rarely the best answer. Keep the current gateway as the router, disable its WiFi if needed, and place one or two APs where people actually use the network.
@Critical-Tailor-17 I checked with NetSpot and the office isn’t actually a dead zone. Signal is around −62 dBm, but there are several neighboring networks overlapping mine on 2.4 GHz. The bedroom drops below −72 though. So I guess I have two separate problems?
Pretty much. Try a cleaner channel or move the office devices to 5 GHz. For the bedroom, reposition the router or add an AP. That’s exactly why measuring first matters. Otherwise you buy a new router and discover it still can’t transmit through three walls.