This is driving me nuts. Wi-Fi is fine in the living room and kitchen, but in my bedroom it gets really bad. Pages half-load, video calls freeze, and Steam downloads crawl.
What’s weird is my phone still shows 3–4 bars in there, so I figured signal should be “good enough.” House is single-story, router is in the living room, and the bedroom is maybe 35–40 feet away with a couple walls in between.
Do I need a new router, or is there something obvious I should check first?
“fine everywhere except one room” usually means placement, not “bad internet.”
If the router is tucked in a corner or behind a TV, move it first before spending money. Central and higher is better. If you can’t move it, then you’re looking at either:
a wired access point closer to that bedroom, or
mesh, if wiring isn’t realistic.
I wouldn’t jump straight to “buy the most expensive router.” One awkward room can still be bad even with a strong router if the placement sucks.
The router is actually inside a TV stand cabinet because I didn’t want it visible.
Yeah… that’s probably reason. Take it out of the cabinet and put it on top for a day as a test. That’s the cheapest possible fix. If the bedroom improves, you found at least part of the problem.
The first thing I’d do is check your Wi-Fi environment to see if there’s any channel congestion. In my experience, this is the most common problem.
How do I check that?
What channel is your Wi-Fi using? Is your device in this room operating on 2.4 or 5 GHz? What does the actual signal strength look like in dBm, not just bars?
No idea, I’ve just been going by the bars.
Use a Wi-Fi analyzer. NetSpot is a good option — it makes it pretty easy to see channel overlap, nearby networks, and signal strength.