Fault-finding
WiFi does not reach the far end of the house
Concrete slabs and brick walls absorb 5GHz badly, and that is normal construction here. The fix is an access point wired to that part of the building, not a repeater — a repeater halves throughput at each hop, which is why a house full of them feels slower the further you get.
Written and reviewed by our networks and fiber bench · Last reviewed
The building is the problem, not the router
A typical house here has concrete floors, brick walls and often steel reinforcement, all of which attenuate the 5GHz band sharply within one or two rooms. Buying a more powerful router does not change physics — the signal still has to cross the same wall, and the far room's device still has to reply.
Why repeaters disappoint
A wireless repeater receives and retransmits on the same radio, so throughput roughly halves at each hop, and it is fighting the same walls your phone is. Two repeaters in series produce a far room with a strong signal bar and very little actual speed — which is more confusing than no coverage at all.
Wire the access point instead
Run a cable to the far part of the building and put an access point there, powered over that same cable. It costs a cable run and it works. Where a run is genuinely impossible, a mesh backhaul is a knowing compromise rather than a default — and it should be said out loud when it is chosen.
Then turn the power down
This sounds backwards and it is the most effective adjustment in most homes. Phones decide when to roam and hold onto a distant radio until it is genuinely bad. Reducing transmit power so the far radio stops being reachable from the next room makes devices hand over cleanly instead of clinging.
Why is my WiFi weak in other rooms?
Will a mesh kit from the market fix it?
In an open-plan flat, often. In a typical concrete house here, the units are talking to each other through the same walls your phone is, so throughput drops at each hop and the far room stays poor. Mesh works well when its units are wired to each other — at which point you have bought access points with extra steps.
Should I use 2.4GHz for better range?
It does travel further through walls, and it is slower and far more congested — in a dense sector every neighbour is on it. The practical answer is to run both, let devices choose, and fix coverage with a wired access point rather than accepting a slow band as the solution to a range problem.
My phone shows full bars but pages will not load. Why?
Signal strength is only half of it — the bars show what your phone hears from the router, not what the router hears back. A phone at the edge of range transmits at low power and the router may not hear it clearly. That asymmetry is why full bars and no throughput happen together.
Rather have it done?
Proper WiFi coverage means access points placed from a survey and wired back to the switch, not repeaters guessing at each other. A three-access-point house or office runs PKR 55,000 to 120,000 installed, and the survey is what stops it becoming another dead corner.
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