Slow WiFi? Dropouts & dead spots fixed Across Nottingham

The job

The usual causes

Before anything gets bought, I look at where the signal starts, where it dies and what’s plugged into what. The same handful of things come up in most Nottingham houses.

• The router’s in the hall cupboard or behind the TV, because that’s where the cable came in.
• Thick brick or block walls between the router and the room you actually use.
• A plug-in booster daisy-chained off another booster, so there are two networks with the same name fighting each other.
• A badly terminated cable from a previous install, running at a fraction of what the line can do.
• Old coax or phone extensions that were never meant to carry broadband.

The three fixes

Once I know the cause, the fix is one of three things.

• Move the router, or the socket it lives on. If the Openreach master socket or the Virgin Media wall box is in a daft corner, I relocate the connection so the router sits in the middle of the house, off the floor. One customer had me move their internet connection and sockets and tidy the wiring in the same visit. Often that’s the whole job.
• Wire in an access point. A cable to a small access point on the wall or ceiling upstairs gives you a proper second signal, not a booster repeating a weak one. Same network name, no drop when you walk up the stairs. The cable run is the same job as an ethernet socket.
• Hardwire the heavy users. The consoles and the work PC. Take them off WiFi and what’s left has the air to itself. One household had nearly two years of slow internet and a string of engineers scratching their heads. I hardwired every PC and Xbox in the house. More on hardwire gaming and TV.

Every socket gets the tester on it before I pack up, then your own device to prove it.

What I won’t do

Sell you a box you don’t need. If a booster would genuinely fix it, I’ll say so. If the fix is a cable, I’ll say that too, and I’ll be honest that it usually is. If the answer is that your broadband package is the problem, I’ll tell you, and what to say to your provider.

If the last engineer’s cable is the fault, I test it and show you the number before I replace anything. That side of the work is on the cable tidy and repairs page.

Random dropouts

Internet that cuts out for thirty seconds at a time and comes back is a different problem to weak signal. Signal is about walls and distance. A dropout points at the cable itself: chafed where it comes round the house, a corroded joint in old coax, or the connection where the line comes in. Message me with when it happens, how long it lasts and whether it’s every device or just one, and I’ll tell you what I’d check.

What it costs

No price list, because a router move across the hall and a wired access point two floors up aren’t the same job. What changes the number is how far the cable goes and how awkward the route is. Send me a photo of where the router is and a photo of the room where the WiFi dies, with your postcode, and I’ll come back with a figure or arrange to look. How pricing works.