During the lockdown, Beacons Telecom wants to talk you through some of the most common internet issues that our support teams are facing and help you to help yourselves.  This makes our lives easier as well which is most welcome!

The Whole Home WiFi Issue

Symptoms

You are on an important Zoom call in the kitchen with the children happily homeschooling in their rooms.  However, breaktime comes and they invade your space to raid the fridge, ignoring your frantic waving to calm them down.  The dining room has a poor signal and you know if you walk into the sitting room where there is a booster, you’ll be cut off and have to reconnect to the network. 

The Problem

There are actually 2 problems in play here.

Firstly, WiFi does not propagate well through many buildings.  This may be caused by old stone walls, insulation in place between walls or just a part of a room that doesn’t work.  We are fortunate to work across many buildings and can confidently say that a solution that works in one house, won’t necessarily work in the neighbours identical house.

The second issue is using WiFi equipment from different suppliers.  Even if you have set this up with the same WiFi SSID, your device will see this as a different network (MAC Address) and so there will be a break when you move from one network to another.   It is common for a device to hang on to a poor connection, even if a better connection is available with little choice as to which you are connecting to.

The Solution

Fortunately, there is a solution! Here’s how.

1. Older properties

With WiFi signals not traveling through old stone walls, there is no chance that a WiFi mesh will work either.  We have seen systems where units are installed to look through doorways to get between rooms but suddenly don’t work if one unit is moved.

Our recommendation is to fit a wired mesh system.  WiFi does travel up and down in a property much easier than side to side and so we recommend one unit in each section of the building. 

Wires can be quickly and easily run in attic spaces, out of sight and the access point can be installed here as well giving great coverage to all rooms beneath the access point.  We’d be happy to talk to you about designing and building a solution for your home or business.

2. Newer properties

Mesh Wifi systems work by creating one network across the whole property and so as long as there are no weak links in the chain, these will work extremely well.  They do use a very high WiFi channel width to get the WiFi speeds needed across a large property which can cause some issues.  WiFi 6 devices can overcome this by using just the part of the WiFi spectrum that will give them the best connection.  You’ll also need to check that your devices support WiFi6 (AX or 802.11 AX) to make the most of it.