Poor Wifi Coverage

[Neetzilla]

Hello everyone I have a question please regarding my wifi coverage. Ever since wifi has been a thing I have had internet in my home. My router has always been in the same room, in the living room below my bedroom in the same spot for many years no matter what ISP I’ve had.

Since going with virgin a few months back I’ve noticed that the wifi signal is very weak in my room all of a sudden when it has never been weak before in all the years having wifi. My phone constantly tells me I have an ‘unstable connection’ and videos buffer because the wifi signal is so weak. I have never had this issue.

I see that virgin have this offer for an extra £8 a month to ‘boost’ my wifi signal but I don’t believe that in all the years of having a perfectly fine wifi coverage in my home, a brand new top of the range router now suddenly fails to provide this coverage.

Are there any settings I can change at home to make this better without having to spend more money? Could my router be faulty since models decades before it could reach my bedroom perfectly fine?

Thanks

[Adduxi]

I doubt very much if I would describe any ISP Hub as "top of the range"

However, are you saying you have always been with VM?  Was it other ISP's that gave better wifi?

VM's wifi offering of the Pods are free to certain Contracts, and £8 pm for others.  If they are not free, I would suggest buy your own kit and don't rent. You will recoup the costs over the year.

[Neetzilla]

Thanks for the reply 

I have used Virgin before yes. My point is that in the last 15 or so years that I’ve had wifi I’ve never struggled with it. The router isn’t too far away, it’s always been there, there hasn’t been any new work done in my home to install thick metal walls or anything of the sort that may impair the signal, so the only other possibility is that the routers signal isn’t strong enough and this seems very convenient with the wifi boosting packages and pods on offer. Why not just make the routers better?

I can’t afford to pay extra every month so I’ll just make do till my contract ends but thanks for the advice, maybe I’ll look into buying a cheap booster outright.

[Megan_L]

Hi Neetzilla, 

Thanks for using the forums to get this issue with your WIFI looked into, I am sorry if this has been causing some frustration. I would be more than happy to look into this for you.

WIFI signal can be tricky to get perfect, WIFI pods do help in instances where the WIFI needs to be spread more evenly throughout a home. However, I completely understand why you'd rather not pay more a month for them. 

There are other tips and tricks you can try, first one being rebooting your Hub once every 2 weeks so that the data within the Hub can refresh. I have checked your services on my side and can see it's been nearly 3 months since your last reboot - So I would highly recommend turning your Hub off at the back, giving it a minute of downtime and switch it back on.

After you've done the reboot I would then move onto using the Connect App to do a WIFI scan of your home, this will detects any issues and suggest any fixes that would help.

Next would be to see if any of your WIFI connected devices could actually be connected via ethernet cable. Things like gaming consoles, TV boxes, PC's etc can all be big draws on your WIFI channels, which could be causing congestion over your WIFI signal. 

Please let us know how you get on!

Thanks,

Megan_L