Full signal in the lounge. Nothing in the bedroom. Same house. Maddening.
WiFi dead zones are one of the most common home broadband complaints. The problem is almost never your broadband connection itself. It's the distance, walls, and interference between your router and your devices. You can have a 500 Mbps line and still get unusable WiFi at the other end of the house.
The fix depends on how bad the problem is, how large your home is, and how much you want to spend. This guide covers every option from free (repositioning your router) to under £300 (a full mesh system).
Why WiFi dead zones happen
WiFi signals degrade with distance and struggle through certain materials. Concrete walls, plaster walls with metal lathe, bathroom tiles, and thick brick walls all block WiFi signals badly. A semi-detached Victorian house with solid brick internal walls will have worse WiFi coverage than a modern open-plan house with plasterboard partitions.
Floor-to-floor signal is often worse than room-to-room. Concrete floors attenuate WiFi heavily. A router on the ground floor of a three-storey house will struggle to reach the top floor.
Interference from neighbouring networks also matters. In a dense urban area, your router might be competing with 20 nearby networks on the same WiFi channel. This doesn't create dead zones exactly, but it can cause slow speeds in areas where the signal is already marginal.
Modern routers use both 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz bands. The 2.4 GHz band travels further and penetrates walls better. The 5 GHz band is faster but shorter range. Dead zones are usually on 5 GHz.
Step one: repositioning your router
Before buying anything, try moving your router. This costs nothing and fixes more dead zone problems than any other single change.
Routers broadcast in all directions. Placing a router in a corner of the house means the signal wastes a third of its range sending signal into your neighbour's wall. Placing it centrally means the entire broadcast area falls within your home.
Get the router off the floor. WiFi signals spread better when the router is at height. A shelf, a bookcase, or on top of a unit all work better than a router sitting on a skirting board.
Keep the router away from thick walls, metal filing cabinets, mirrors, and microwaves (which operate on the same 2.4 GHz frequency and cause interference). A router on a wooden desk near the centre of a room, elevated off the surface, will outperform the same router shoved behind a TV cabinet.
If your ISP's router is locked to the phone socket position and that position is in a corner of the house, you can still extend the ethernet cable (or use a MoCA adapter on your coax cable) to get the router to a better location.
WiFi extenders (range extenders)
A WiFi extender picks up your existing WiFi signal and rebroadcasts it. They're cheap (£20 to £60) and simple to set up. Plug in, press the WPS button on your router, done.
The downside: extenders create a second network, or a separate node on the same network name, that your devices don't always switch between cleanly. You might find a phone clings to the weaker router signal even when the extender is closer and stronger. Walking between rooms can mean brief disconnections as devices switch between the router and extender.
Extenders also halve throughput. They receive a signal on one radio and retransmit on the same radio. The maximum speed to a device connected via an extender is roughly half the speed of the original connection at the extender's location.
Good for: occasional dead zone in one specific room where you don't need high speeds. Not ideal for working from home or streaming 4K in the dead zone area.
Recommended budget options: TP-Link RE305, Netgear EX3700. Both under £40 and reliable for casual use.
Powerline adapters
Powerline adapters use your home's electrical wiring to carry the network signal. One adapter plugs into a socket near your router and connects via ethernet. A second adapter plugs into a socket in the dead zone room and either provides an ethernet port or its own WiFi broadcast.
Speeds vary depending on the quality of your electrical wiring and whether the two sockets are on the same circuit. Modern powerline adapters can reach 600 to 1,200 Mbps in theory. In practice, real-world speeds in older homes are more like 100 to 200 Mbps. Still better than no signal at all.
Powerline works well in houses where the electrical wiring is good but running an ethernet cable isn't practical. It doesn't work across different electricity meters (in converted flats, for example).
Recommended: TP-Link AV1300 Powerline Kit. Around £40 for a pair. Reliable and easy to set up.
Mesh WiFi systems
A mesh system is the best solution for large homes or homes with persistent dead zones. Instead of one router trying to cover the whole house, a mesh uses two or three nodes placed around the property. The nodes communicate with each other on a dedicated backhaul channel, invisible to your devices. Your phone, laptop, and smart TV see one network name and switch automatically between nodes as you move around the house.
The difference from an extender is that the nodes are built to work together. Switching is automatic and devices connect to the closest, strongest node without any manual action. Speed is not halved, because nodes communicate on a separate band.
Budget mesh option: TP-Link Deco M4 (2-pack), around £70. Covers a 3 to 4 bedroom house. Simple app setup. Speeds up to 300 Mbps at the satellite nodes.
Mid-range mesh option: Eero 6+ (2-pack), around £150. Wi-Fi 6 support. Covers larger homes. Works well with Amazon devices. App-based parental controls included.
Premium mesh option: Netgear Orbi RBK763S (3-pack), around £350. Tri-band with a dedicated backhaul. Best for very large homes or homes with thick walls. Overkill for most people but near-perfect coverage when configured properly.
For most 3 to 4 bedroom UK homes, a mid-range 2-node mesh system is the right answer. It handles dead zones, reduces the need to switch networks manually, and the improvement over a single router is immediate. Our broadband for working from home guide covers why stable WiFi throughout your home matters more than headline connection speed for many use cases.
When to call your ISP
If you've repositioned your router and your main devices still show poor speeds on an ethernet connection, the problem may be with the line, not the WiFi. Run a speed test plugged directly into the router via ethernet cable and compare the result to what your provider promised. If it's well below what they promised, that's a line issue, not a coverage issue.
Our speed test tool takes a minute and gives you download, upload, and ping. How to read a broadband speed test explains what the numbers mean and when to escalate to your ISP.
If your speeds are fine on ethernet and poor on WiFi throughout the house, a mesh system will solve it. Start with a budget option. You can always add a third node later if coverage needs extending further.