I’m having a weird WiFi issue in one corner of my bedroom and I can’t tell if I actually need another AP or if I’m looking at the wrong thing.
My router is in the living room, roughly 20–25 ft away with one wall between us. On 5 GHz my iPhone drops to around -70 dBm or worse in bed, so I made a 2.4 GHz-only network to test.
That looks much better, usually around -63 to -66 dBm according to the controller.
But the actual experience still sucks sometimes. Reddit stops loading, streaming buffers, websites hang for a few seconds, etc.
The weird part is my Surface laptop works fine from basically the same spot.
My first thought was to add another AP between the router and bedroom, but since I’m renting it would have to use wireless backhaul.
Would you add another AP here or is there something else I should check first?
I wouldn’t buy another AP yet. You already know the signal number, but RSSI isn’t the whole story. I’d actually survey the bedroom. NetSpot is pretty decent for this. Map the 2.4 and 5 GHz coverage and look at SNR/SIR too, especially around the bed. If signal is okay but performance falls apart in one corner, I’d want to know whether you’re dealing with noise/contention before adding more radios.
@Mysterious_Bid_20 If I’m getting around -65 on 2.4, shouldn’t that be pretty solid?
Signal-wise, yeah, that’s not terrible. But you can have perfectly usable RSSI and still get bad throughput because of interference, retries, or a busy channel.Three WiFi bars aren’t telling you any of that.
Just keep in mind that a survey from your laptop tells you what the laptop sees. Your iPhone radio/antenna isn’t identical. Since the Surface works fine from the exact same location, I’d test the phone itself too. Run a speed test and maybe a local throughput test if you can.
Have you tried just moving the router?
@Echo_Silence Unfortunately it’s kind of stuck there because of the fiber drop and my desktop being wired to it. I could maybe raise it a bit though.