Slow Wi-Fi: six checks to make before calling your provider
The video stalls, the call breaks up, and the temptation is to switch provider. In most cases the problem is inside your home and costs nothing to fix. Here is how to find out in half an hour.
- Level
- principiante
- Time
- 30 minutes
- What you need
- Your phone and the router (the box with the little lights)
The video freezes at the best bit, the video call turns into a mosaic, the page takes ten seconds to open. The conclusion almost everyone reaches is that the line is no good and it’s time to change provider.
Often it isn’t that at all. Between the socket in the wall and your sofa the connection passes through a good many points where it can slow down, and nearly all of them are inside your home. Before signing a new contract it’s worth going through them, because they’re half an hour of checks and they cost nothing.
Line: the connection coming from outside into your home. Router (or modem): the box with the little lights that turns that connection into your home Wi-Fi. Wi-Fi: the wireless part between the router and your devices. When "the internet is slow", the culprit is almost always one of these three, and they are three different things.
Check 1: is it the line or the Wi-Fi?
This question cuts the problem in half, which is why every other check comes after it.
- Take your phone and stand next to the router, in the same room.
- Open the browser and run a speed test: your provider's app will do, or the free public measuring tool your national telecoms regulator offers, which doesn't push anything at you to install.
- Write down the download figure in Mbps.
- 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 trouble is in the Wi-Fi, so it’s inside your home and you can fix it yourself. If it’s low in both places, the line really is involved, 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 the scene is nearly always identical. The router lives in the hallway, low down, inside a cabinet, where the engineer put it on installation day because that’s 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 it costs nothing.
Check 3: are you on the right band
A modern router transmits on two bands at once. On some models they appear as two separate networks in your Wi-Fi list, on many others they sit under a single name, and the router decides on its own which one to put you on.
The 2.4 GHz band travels further and handles walls better, but in today’s homes it’s nearly always the crowded one, because every neighbour and a good few appliances are on it too. The speed goes there, in the crowding, rather than in the band itself. The 5 GHz band is generally much faster, but it has little patience with walls.
- 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. If you see only one name, the router is choosing for you and you can skip this check.
- In the room you are in, connect to the 5 GHz one and run the test again.
- 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.
The "5G" in a Wi-Fi network name has nothing to do with 5G on your phone. They are two different things that unfortunately sound almost identical: one is a home Wi-Fi band, the other is a mobile network.
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 is to turn Wi-Fi off on everything except the phone you’re testing with, and run the test again. If it suddenly flies, there’s nothing wrong with the line, it’s the queue in front of you.
Check 5: restart it, but properly
Restarting is the support-desk joke, and yet on routers it genuinely works, because they’re small computers left switched on for years.
- Pull the router's plug out of the socket.
- Wait thirty seconds, actually counted: they let the session close on the provider's side as well, so that when you plug it back in the connection starts from scratch instead of picking up where it left off.
- Plug it back in and wait for all the lights to go steady, usually two or three minutes.
- Run the test again.
If the problem comes back every few days and a restart fixes it every time, that’s a symptom to report to support. It often means an old or faulty router, and they’ll 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, so what you measure comes much closer to the connection’s real speed. It still isn’t a perfect measurement, since the computer’s network port, the cable itself and the test server all remain in the way, but it’s the most reliable test you can run from home.
It’s 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.
Run the test next to the router and far from it: if the number changes a lot, the problem is Wi-Fi and you fix it by moving the router high and central, for free. If the number is low everywhere, and stays low on a cable too, the problem is almost certainly outside the house: now you call, and you have numbers to quote instead of "it's slow".
What to say when you call
Turning up with numbers changes the call 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.
Then there’s something useful to know before you phone. 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 isn’t, you can leave without penalty. It’s in the terms you signed, under quality of service. Watch out for one detail, though, because it’s what gets complaints thrown out: as far as the provider is concerned, tests run on a phone count for nothing. What counts is the certified measurement your national regulator provides, usually free, which you download and run on a computer wired to the router. In Italy, for example, that’s the Ne.Me.Sys tool from the regulator’s Misurainternet site.
If you’re weighing up a new offer and wondering whether 5G is the answer, I cover that in what is 5G actually for.
If before all that you want a number to start from, I have put a tool online that measures from the browser what reaches this device, and explains the result instead of handing you a bare figure: How good is my connection?. It is worth what a measurement taken on a phone is worth, and the page says why.