More and more people ask me for tips and tricks to improve their WiFi setup in their homes. People that recently moved in a new flat and want good coverage all over the place, which includes the living area, sleep quarters, kitchen or even bathroom, and people that just built a new 3 story house or the likes of it.

The first mistake that everyone makes is to place the router exactly where the internet connection enters the house, and that’s usually one of the corners where flats are concerned, or the basement for multistory buildings. Almost any decent WiFi router on the market today can cover an 80 to 100 square meters flat, so I won’t go into much depth on that situation, but when large houses are concerned, you need to have in mind that the best place to position your WiFi router is at the center of the structure. So, if you have a basement, ground floor, and 1st floor, you would be better off placing the device on the ground floor instead of the basement, where the internet connection is made available by the ISP. This way, you will get good coverage on the ground floor, and the adjacent floors, without the need to scale the network up to more than one router. If you have your office in the basement and your rest room on the 1st floor, it would be probably a good idea to have two separate access points and use an Ethernet connection between them. However, placing your only router in the basement is never a good idea, and should not be tried. The easiest way to test everything is to plug in a router with no WAN connectivity and walk around the house with your laptop to see where the weak points in the WiFi network are.

Feel free to post comments about your setup, or your needs based on your new home, and remember Wireless Is Fun to play with and it’s darn useful to have all over your property! Garden included ;-)

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