Tips for shocking wifi!

Hi
Just wondering if anyone has any useful tips for trying to get a better wifi signal? I live in a rural setting where my download speed ranges from 0.9 to 3.5 mbps...yep that bad! I had a BT engineer out sorting something out and he said its bad in the area. But my neighbour is getting about 6-7mbps and he lives about 400 yards away but is more elevated and has an upstairs. I have been looking into getting an outdoor router and placing it high on our outside wall, or anywhere that gets better signal. Any ideas? How does it work?
Switching to 4G is an option but if it means waiting till our talk talk contract runs out I'd rather get something sooner. Homeschooling and working from home has exposed us to how rubbish it currently is.
Any tips/advice would be great. Thanks

So your current router is fed by the phone line ?

What difference is it going to make having it externally ? The wifi comes from the router, so in the property is where it wants to be .

What your issue is is the signal itself . Do you have any extension wiring in the house for instance ?

Have you a computer you can connect to the router with a cable to do a speed test?
Are the speeds still very slow?

The questions are to work out if you have a "broadband speed" problem, or a "wifi" problem. They are not the same thing.

Ah, well I have a recommended netgear app on my phone and it read 0.7 at one end of the house and up as far as 3.2 when I was right beside the router. Is that any help? Plus the BT engineer had read it at about 3.0 when he was checking something else adding it was bad in the area. he didnt elaborate.
Thanks for help by the way.

What broadband router and modem. do you have?

The majority will have a status page that tells you what speed the broadband is connected at

The stats as MrS says will help understand but it sounds like your BT line is only capable of around 3Mb/s. The stats will give an idea of whether that is the max you are going to get. The fact your wifi is worse at the other end of the house is because the wifi is likely getting slowed down by distance - that is normal and could be resolved a few different ways (putting your router on the outside of the house not being one of them). But, no matter what you do about the wifi signal you are still limited by the speed of the line - if that can't be sorted then the best you will even get is 3Mb/s.

Perhaps a little explanation to put into context the information that has been posted so far. Apologies if you already know all of this but it may be helpful.

The internet arrives in your house through the telephone wire. In terms of this conversation there is no wireless or wifi involved in getting the internet to you. The speed of the connection is governed by the technology used and the physical constraints of your location. The main physical constraint is the length of wire between your property and the connection point where you hit the main internet connections. If you are on ADSL-type technology this will be the distance to your local exchange. If you are on VDSL technology (what the marketing people often call "fibre") you are on a halfway house, where the very fast optic fibre technology brings the signal as far as the green cabinet in the street from which your property is again fed by the telephone wire. The main limiting factor will then be the length of wire from the cabinet to your property. Your speeds may also be affected by the quality of the wiring connecting the exchange or cabinet to your property and by any internal telephone wiring problems within your own property (such as incorrectly configured extension wiring etc.) You have no control over most of that connection as far as the main socket where the connection arrives in your property.

Within your property you can distribute the signal through wired connections or wifi. The wired connections (ethernet connections) run from the sockets in your router to sockets in your equipment and are usually the most reliable way to connect. There is also powerline technology where you connect the router to an adaptor plugged into an electric main in the house. You plug another adaptor into another socket on the same electric network which receives the signal and then allows wired connection to your devices or transmits as wifi signal for remote connection. Powerline technology does not have the same level of efficiency as direct connection using ethernet cables.

Wifi transmits a wireless signal from your router which your devices pick up. The strength of the signal fades with distance and is also affected by solid obstacles such as stone walls. This is more likely in older houses than those of modern construction. In simple terms you cannot improve the speed or strength of the Wifi signal put out by your router but you can improve the coverage by careful location of the router. Normally higher is better and provided the signal covers the whole house, nearer the centre of the building.

To try and see what can be done to improve the situation it would be helpful to see the statistics returned by your router. If you can post the type of router, there will be plenty of people round here who can tell you how to get at the statistics. Also do you have any near neighbours who can tell you what speeds they are getting? As another thought, when you connect a phone to the landline (preferably a corded phone not a hand-held) is the line clear of noise with no crackles, hums or buzzes? This could be a fault which is also interfering with the internet signal.

It may be that your internet connection is working to its best capacity and you are unfortunately suffering the consequences of your location but it may be that there is a fault on the line which would require your service provider to take remedial action or there may be a fault inside your property which you can take steps to resolve. Without the numbers it is impossible to tell.

Finally, if you have a viable mobile signal it may be possible to get a more reliable connection to the internet through the mobile telephone network than the landline which may be something else you could consider.

That's a useful explanation for the OP . However you missed out an important option, installing one or more WAPs. Also the minor point that Powerline systems can be less than brilliant. (My brother has a single pairing that works fine for him, but there are often problems reported on these forums).

For the op that's Wireless Access Points where basically the same wifi technology as provides wifi from your router is placed in a small box the you connect to the router by a single ethernet cable. With luck, just one towards the far end of the house might surfice.

The loss of signal strength and speed in an ethernet Category 5 or 6 cable of up to 100 metres is effectively zero.

If you have an old router doing nothing, the settings in that can usually be easily altered to disabled to turn it into a WAP, then connect that to your active router by ethernet.

These days there are also a number of "Mesh" systems that I gather are brilliant for distributing wifi around a house without using ethernet, though how effective they are in older stone-built houses for example I don't know. They didn't exist when I was in the business.

Hi Gonepostal

That's a great bit of info to work with. I pretty much understand most of it and I think I can see where the issue mainly is. So I think we may be ADSL. as we are in the countryside and the there hasn't been any cables laid on our road ever. The nearest road that would have anything is about quarter of a mile away. I have never seen a green box nearby. Our nearest neighbour is about 300 metres away and gets about 5-7mbps whereas we are between 0.9 and 3mbps at best.
You mentioned a crackling on the line and that is something that we have always had, plus we have had several issues over the years with our phone line and having to bring engineers out to sort it. So it may be the internal wiring issue as you suggested.
At the phone junction we have box called a mastersocket 5c from Openreach. It has a Tel cable running from it to phone. It also has a Broadband cable running from it to the Talk Talk Router which is a Huwei HG633 . No ariel.
It may be a suggestion to look down the road of using a 4G supplier once the Talk Talk contract is up, although we do drift into 3G sometimes. I would get a supplier to come to the house to confirm what I was going to get for my bucks this time. I don't fancy ripping wires out of walls and getting the whole thing re done if I can get good service from a 4G supplier.
Look I really appreciate all the help everyone is giving here, its just becoming unworkable and I'm just trying to figure my next move.
Regards

Also, there is no ethernet cables running from or to router anywhere. By that I mean there are 4 ethernet points at the back of the router and no cables are going or coming from it. Don't know if thats ir relevant

Re jchamier's post earlier, there would be a 1-2 metre ethernet cable came with your router. That plugs into the router and most laptops have an ethernet socket. So you could do this speedtest and post us the link it gives.

Speed tests using an ethernet connection are the best way of seeing what you can get. Make sure you turn off the wifi of the laptop, and don't have anyone/anything using the internet at the same time. It only takes a minute or two to run.

If you register on that link first, it's the main site of these forums, (you can use the same username and password but it is a separate system), then your Profile there records your results.

You wouldn't expect to have seen any cable-laying as the point of the halfway house VDSL "fibre" is that additional cables would not be laid between the cabinet and the property; the internet feed is coming through the existing telephone cable.

It would be good to find out if you are locked to the older, slower ADSL service (or are a long distance from the cabinet on a VDSL connection) or you have the option of upgrading to VDSL. You can check what is available using the BT Broadband Checker. If the system does not recognise your phone number you can use the address checker which is linked from the bottom of that page.

When you use the BT checker it tells you to which cabinet you are connected. Once you get the number of the cabinet this page on the Kitz web-site explains how to narrow down the location of your cabinet (look at the section headed "~ More Information about your cabinet").

The interference on your telephone line may be internal or external so it might pay to report it to your supplier as a telephone fault, not a broadband fault. Sorting that may have the benefit of helping your broadband as well.

PS Thanks to Bob (RobertoS) for filling in the bits I missed the first time.

"You mentioned a crackling on the line and that is something that we have always had"

A phone line should be silent. I would suggest complaining to your provider about the noisy line and your internet speed may get slightly better once that is fixed.

Ditto ......spooky.

In reply to a post by broadband66:

Ditto ......spooky.

Posted just as I was typing a similar message so even spookier.

In reply to a post by jonmar:

Ah, well I have a recommended netgear app on my phone and it read 0.7 at one end of the house and up as far as 3.2 when I was right beside the router. Is that any help? Plus the BT engineer had read it at about 3.0 when he was checking something else adding it was bad in the area. he didnt elaborate.
Thanks for help by the way.

Not withstanding 'gonepostal's explanation about WiFi through walls etc. I had that old TalkTalk router some years back, at the incoming speed you get was still able to pick up that same speed through a couple of walls, one brick(well an inglenook) and the other 'lathe and plaster', I now have the later TalkTalk router (well four of them, but that's another story), and am still on same incoming speed, I've just been out and about my garden, I can report that even after a couple of walls and 25yards down the garden, or couple of walls and then in my wooden shed, I still get the same speed. It could be that you have some very thick walls, and/or that old router is not quite as good as the newer one, but don't forget, it could be the phone you are using isn't as good on WiFi, also if anything else was running the speed would show as lower.

So I checked the BT broadband checker and got a rough location for the cabinet which is a mile away...roughly. I also checked what I can get from BT when I put in my address 3-6mbps Download and 1mbps upload. That was the same as the green cabinet output and in line with what I measured on my app. Bearing in mind I have 3 teenagers and working from home has put added pressure on the service. The more I unpick this I feel in may be the initial BT line into the house which is only 15 years old. I'll do a proper read later when everyone is finished school/work etc as advised earlier.
Again, thanks for help everyone. I'm learning if nothing else!

I would definitely get that crackle on the line resolved, but that's only half the solution.

I've been in this situation before where you simply can't get enough bandwidth from a single connection, but where a provider can install multiple connections at the same address (not sure if BT can do that). If a provider can install multiple connections, each running at full speed, you can use a special type of router called a multi-wan router to connect them all to the same network. And the good thing is that a multi-wan router doesn't care what the speed or source of the connection is, so you can use 2x adsl, 1x cellular and any other mix as you see fit. On the computer side, the computers don't even know the difference.

I did this for a few years when cable providers couldn't provide me with enough upload bandwidth in a single connection without moving to a business line that cost 10x more. So I got 3x cable connections and in the end spent 1/3 the cost of the business line and still had 1.5x the upload bandwidth that the business line had.

We really need to know for sure if this is ADSL or VDSL - if ADSL then distance to the exchange impacts line speed and if VDSL (FTTC) then it is distance to the cabinet. Also, a number of people have asked for the stats from your router - you need to login to the router and find the stats page and let us know what they are.