Slow Wi-Fi: six checks to make before calling your provider

The video freezes at the best bit, the video call turns into a mosaic, the page takes ten seconds to open. Almost everyone reaches the same conclusion: the line is rubbish, time to change provider.

Often it is not. Between the socket in the wall and your sofa there are at least five points where the connection can slow down, and four of them are inside your home. Before signing a new contract, it is worth going through them: half an hour of checks, and they cost nothing.

Check 1: is it the line or the Wi-Fi?

This is the question that cuts the problem in half, and it is why every other check comes after it.

1. Take your phone and stand next to the router, in the same room.
2. Open the browser and run a speed test: search for "speed test" and use the first result, or your provider's app.
3. Write down the download figure in Mbps.
4. Now go to the part of the house where the problem shows up, and run the same test again.

If speed is good next to the router and collapses further away, the problem is Wi-Fi: it is inside your home and you can fix it yourself. If it is low in both places, the problem is the line, and that needs your provider. Knowing which of the two is already half the job.

Check 2: where the router sits

This is the number one cause, and it is nearly always the same story: the router lives in the hallway, low down, inside a cabinet, where the engineer put it on installation day because that is where the socket was.

Wi-Fi spreads in every direction, and walls eat it. The right place is high up, out in the open, as central in the house as possible. A shelf in the corridor beats a closed cabinet in the hallway by a long way.

Genuinely worth avoiding: inside closed furniture, behind the television, resting against the fridge, near the microwave, behind large metal surfaces or mirrors.

Moving it two metres and raising it by one can change everything, and costs nothing.

Check 3: are you on the right band

A modern router transmits on two bands at once, and they usually appear as two different networks in your Wi-Fi list.

The 2.4 GHz band travels further and handles walls better, but it is slow and crowded because all your neighbours use it too. The 5 GHz band is much faster but has little patience with walls.

1. Look at the Wi-Fi list on your phone: if you see two similar names, one ending in something like "-5G", those are the two bands.
2. In the room you are in, connect to the 5 GHz one and run the test again.
3. If it is much better near the router but not in the far room, you have your confirmation: the problem is distance, not the line.

Check 4: who is eating the bandwidth

A single device can take the whole connection and leave everything else dry. The usual suspects are the television downloading an update, a computer syncing the cloud, a console pulling down an 80 GB game.

The fastest way to find out: turn Wi-Fi off on everything except the phone you are testing with, and run the test again. If it suddenly flies, the problem is not the line, it is the queue.

Check 5: restart it, but properly

Restarting is the support-desk joke, but on routers it genuinely works, because they are small computers left switched on for years.

1. Pull the router's plug out of the socket.
2. Wait thirty seconds, actually counted. It lets the capacitors drain and the connection start from scratch.
3. Plug it back in and wait for all the lights to go steady, usually two or three minutes.
4. Run the test again.

If the problem comes back every few days and a restart fixes it every time, that is a symptom worth reporting: it often means an old or faulty router, and they will replace it.

Check 6: the cable, when you want certainty

If you have a desktop computer or a television near the router, connect it with a network cable and run the test. The cable takes Wi-Fi out of the picture entirely: what you measure is the real line.

It is also the definitive fix for whichever device matters most to you. A ten-metre cable costs ten euros and permanently solves the television that stutters in the evening.

What to say when you call

Turning up with numbers changes the conversation completely. Give the speed measured over the cable, the time of day it happens, whether it also happens at night, and whether a restart fixes it temporarily. Ask them to open a fault ticket with a reference number, and write that number down.

One thing worth knowing: your contract states a minimum guaranteed speed, usually far below the advertised one. If your line sits below that threshold consistently, you have the right to demand it be restored, and if it is not, to leave without penalty. It is in the terms you signed, under quality of service.

If you are weighing up a new offer and wondering whether 5G is the answer, we cover that in what is 5G actually for.