Broadband not reaching around house

[Rosyelizabeth]

Hi. I live in a small 2 bedroom house and my broadband does not cover it. Nothing in the bathroom. Very intermittent in the bedroom which is located directly above the hub. 
the hubs located in a sensible place no interfering factors. Any advice? 

[Jayach]

Someone will be along to recommend you split the bands shortly, but personally my advice would be to get a better router. (or add an access point)

If you could get a Sky SR203 router cheap on eBay, that may be your best bet.

[gavs82008]

@Jayach 

It can’t be helped to say “split the bands” as it’s one of the things listed by NOW to help the broadband, albeit more aimed at speeds. Still they do want all options to be exhausted before being contacted. 

@Rosyelizabeth that being said I agree with @Jayach and that’s to get a new router as the NOW router isn’t the best and well known to be poor when it comes to Wi-Fi.

[Jayach]

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@gavs82008 wrote:

@Jayach 

It can’t be helped to say “split the bands” as it’s one of the things listed by NOW to help the broadband, albeit more aimed at speeds.

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They may list it as a possibility, doesn't mean it will actually help.

If they shipped their routers with the bands split, they would say try combining the bands to improve performance.

The only real solution is a device with better Wi-Fi performance, be that a different router or an access point.

[RoyB]

Further, splitting the bands can only possibly help if the band steering negotiated by the router with one or more devices is sub-optimum.

And even if it is, just splitting the bands won’t help; you will then have to manually knife-and-fork each 5GHz device you have onto the correct band - 5GHz if the device is on 2.4GHz but within 5GHz range (speed improvement, at the price of potential range reduction) or 2.4GHz if the device is using 5GHz at or just beyond the range limit (range improvement, at the price of potential speed reduction).

Doable, if you are technically inclined, for devices in fixed locations, but likely to become sub-optimal once more for devices that you move about the property, like tablets and mobile phones.

Now suggest only that you split the bands, as if devices with sub-optimal band steering will automagically get it right once you do that, which of course they won’t; quite often the converse will happen.

You separate the bands, and give each its own SSID, so that you can manually adjust all examples of poor band steering. If you just split the bands, without doing the subsequent manual adjustments, then any improvement is entirely accidental; and more likely than not, it will make things worse.

[Me-too]

try getting it higher up and off the floor.