Poor wireless coverage in house

I get decent speed incoming to the router 60-70Mb and wireless in that room (office) and the attached living room is fine. It's bad on the other side of the house and upstairs despite using wireless boosters (including the one from Sky Q) . Powerline boosters are ok but can't use phones etc on them.

Not sure whether to:
1) change ISP - not sure if I can due to contracts/costs
2) change router - do other routers work better than the sky provided one? (it's the black sky Q one) - is this technically an issue connecting with Sky?
3) Invest proper £££ in a mesh system - if so which is decent and reliable with sky BB?

Any advice welcome before I get murdered by my kids/wife as any connection issues are clearly MY FAULT. Cheers!

Edited by deleted (Wed 19-May-21 13:10:37)

Foil backed plasterboard stud partitions can reduce wifi as well as thick walls and the distance from the router to the device.

You will have to spend money to upgrade to Mesh or APs throughout the house.

Cable some network ports around the house using Cat5e/Cat6. Buy a couple of PoE WAPs and a small PoE switch to drive them. Yes, it will cost, buy may save your life!

As MHC says - you can try all the wireless boosters and upgraded routers, but the only way to be sure is to run in some cabling

Get more boosters from sky, assuming they’re in the package. Plenty of people with 4 or so, eg my house I have the main router, a sky q tv box, a mini box and a booster. They all boost the wifi.

It’s not as great if you’re far from the hub but it’s not far off and plays TV just fine. Sky generally send an engineer to the address and test the signal for you.

You have pretty much the same set up as me but it's not adequate for coverage in my house unfortunately.

Annoyingly it is going to be awkward to do this as we've had really nice floors laid a couple of years back that I can't really disturb. If I'd known what the coverage in the back of the house was like (didn't find out until wife and kids had to work from home during lockdown) then I might have thought about this at the time. I'll have to see if there's anyway of doing it...

The only way to sort it for sure is to run network cable and install access points.

If you can't run the cable inside, can you run it round the outside of the house?

I put polystyrene coving in one room to hide a cat 5 network cable at ceiling level - it is not usually difficult to get through walls but the hole has to be large enough to take an ethernet connector unless one can put your own connectors onto cable.

Are *all* your floors laid to difficult to lift? Aka are there upstairs floors that are carpet and easyish to lift? If you can get some cables to the upstairs floor then you can put in some ceiling mounted access points powered using PoE.

Basically anything that does not involve running some Cat5e/6 cable is a bodge that may work but is more likely to be unsatisfactory. It's a hard truth but it's reality. The only thing I would say is that good wifi and connectivity is only likely to be more important in the future. That's the sound of me feeling smug putting in full structured Cat6a wiring 12 years ago in my house.