A router that delivers 400 Mbps in the hallway and 25 Mbps in the back bedroom does not need replacing. It needs a different channel, a different band, or one cable. Before spending money, measure the gap and then fix the cheapest thing that explains it.
Measure in the room that feels slow, at the hour it feels slow
Run a speed test twice: one metre from the router, then in the room where video calls freeze. Do both between 8pm and 10pm, when the neighbourhood is streaming. Compare those two numbers, not the figure on your plan.
If the near-router result is already close to what you pay for and the far result collapses, the problem is radio coverage or interference. If both are low, the fault is upstream — modem, cabling or the ISP — and no router setting will help. A third data point settles it: the phone’s link speed. On Android it appears in Settings > Wi-Fi > [network]; on iPhone tap the info button beside the network name. A 5 GHz connection reporting 400 Mbps or better while a speed test shows 20 Mbps means the air is fine and something else is throttling you.
Fix the channel plan before touching anything else
The 2.4 GHz band has three usable channels in most of the world: 1, 6 and 11 at 20 MHz width. Everything else overlaps, and a router left on “auto” frequently parks itself on top of four neighbours. Install a Wi-Fi analyser on an Android phone, walk to the slow room, and look at which of those three channels is emptiest. Then set it manually in the router’s admin page.
While you are there, force 2.4 GHz to 20 MHz. The 40 MHz option looks faster on paper and is slower in practice anywhere with neighbours, because it consumes most of the band and collides with everyone.
On 5 GHz, use channels 36–48 or 149–165 where your country allows, at 80 MHz width. The DFS channels between 52 and 144 work, but some laptops and TVs drop for 60 seconds when they detect radar — random disconnects rather than slowness. 160 MHz sounds better and usually is not: it doubles the interference risk and often halves the range.
Split the bands so old devices stop dragging the network
Most routers ship with one network name shared across both bands and “band steering” deciding which device goes where. It is convenient and often wrong: cheap smart plugs, printers and older phones get parked on 5 GHz where their weak antennas struggle, or drag 2.4 GHz airtime with 802.11n rates.
Give the bands separate names — “Home” and “Home-5G” — then connect laptops, phones, consoles and the TV to the 5 GHz name, and leave doorbells, bulbs and the printer on 2.4 GHz. Airtime is shared, so one device stuck at 1 Mbps can cost every other device on the same radio a noticeable slice of throughput.
Put the smart-home gear on the guest network as well, if the router supports it. It keeps a compromised bulb away from your laptop. Placement still matters more than any of this: a router on the floor behind a TV cabinet loses 6–10 dB before the signal leaves the room, which is roughly half the range. The measurements in router placement tips are worth repeating in your own flat before you buy hardware.
Take traffic off the air: the free backhaul options
Every device moved to a cable returns bandwidth to everything still wireless. Cat5e is rated for 1 Gbps over 100 metres and costs very little per metre; a flat profile cable slides under a carpet edge or behind skirting without a drill. A short run on a wooden floor is a 30-minute job that beats any extender.
Where cabling is impossible, three alternatives are all better than a repeater. A spare router cabled to the main one and set as an access point gives full speed in the far room — the configuration steps are in using an old router as an access point. Powerline adapters push the signal over mains wiring and typically deliver 40–70% of a direct cable, depending on how the circuits are split; the trade-offs are covered in extending Wi-Fi to another floor. Where coaxial cable already runs through the walls, a MoCA pair is close to Ethernet.
A plain extender repeats on the same radio, so it halves throughput while showing full bars — the usual cause of “full signal, slow page”. If you must use one, put it where the signal is still good, not in the dead room.
Firmware, QoS and settings that change throughput
The admin page lives at 192.168.1.1, 192.168.0.1 or 192.168.50.1 depending on the brand; ASUS uses router.asus.com, TP-Link uses tplinkwifi.net. Check Administration > Firmware Update first — a router two years behind can carry driver bugs that appear as dropped packets under load.
Then look for QoS or “Smart Queue”. Under 100 Mbps, enabling it with the upload figure near 90% of your plan removes bufferbloat — the queue delay that makes a call stutter when someone starts a download.
Finally, switch off the legacy 802.11b rate, WPS, and any “range boost” toggle that raises transmit power without improving the return path from your phone. Wi-Fi 6 routers do handle crowded air better through OFDMA, which packs several small transmissions into one slot — the Wi-Fi Alliance explains the mechanism at wi-fi.org. That matters in apartment blocks, and it is the one upgrade that survives a channel cleanup.
