Why is my office Wi-Fi slow in one room?

Wi-Fi that is slow in one room is almost never a broadband problem. It is a coverage problem: the access point is too far away, or something between the two is absorbing the signal, and the device is clinging on at a very low data rate rather than dropping the connection outright.

That last part is why it feels like slowness rather than failure. Wi-Fi degrades gracefully. As signal quality falls, the device negotiates a slower and slower rate to stay connected. A laptop showing two bars may be running at a fraction of the speed of one showing four, while appearing to be perfectly well connected.

The usual culprits are duller than people expect. Solid walls, particularly older brick and anything with foil-backed insulation. Metal: filing cabinets, shelving, plant rooms, lift shafts and steel-framed buildings. Water, which includes both plumbing and, in a full meeting room, people. And distance, which in a typical office building is a shorter distance than the router’s box suggested.

A quick way to confirm it: stand in the problem room and check the signal strength on a phone, then walk toward the access point. If the strength climbs steadily, it is coverage. If it stays poor everywhere, or is fine everywhere but the speed is bad regardless, the problem is elsewhere: the broadband line, the router, or something saturating the connection.

What actually fixes coverage is another access point, positioned properly and wired back to the network. What generally does not is a consumer range extender, which halves throughput by design and creates a second network your devices will refuse to hand over between at exactly the wrong moment. Nor does replacing the router, unless the router genuinely is the access point and it is at the far end of the building from where people sit.

In an office of any size the right answer is a short site survey, walking the building with a meter, checking the actual signal in the places people work rather than in the corridor, and placing access points against that. It is an hour of work and it is the difference between fixing the problem and moving it.

Two things worth checking before spending anything. Is the access point in a cupboard, behind a metal cabinet, or on the floor? And is everything on the 2.4GHz band because someone disabled 5GHz years ago to fix an unrelated problem? Both are common and both are free to correct.

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