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Challenge: The Upstairs Dead Zone

Help a family fix weak Wi-Fi upstairs in a two-story house.

The quiet bedroom

Your friend Dana lives in a two-story house. The Wi-Fi is great in the living room downstairs. Upstairs, her son's bedroom barely gets one bar. His video calls for school keep freezing.

You go for a look. The router sits on the floor of a closet, in a downstairs corner. That corner is under the far end of the house from his room. A big metal filing cabinet stands right next to it.

His laptop is joined to the 5 GHz network. The internet plan is 300 Mbps. A speed test next to the router shows about 290 Mbps.

Dana asks if she needs a new internet plan.

Move it first

Before buying anything, you try the free fix. The router is in a corner closet, on the floor, beside metal.

A longer cable from the wall lets you move it. You set it on a high shelf near the middle of the house, out in the open. Now it sits much closer to the stairs and the bedroom above.

Upstairs, the laptop now shows two or three bars. Calls work most of the time, but still stutter now and then.

Mesh or extender

Dana wants the bedroom to be solid. You talk about two options.

One small box could repeat the router's signal into that one room. But it may cut the speed and add a second network name. A set of matching boxes would cover both floors with one name. Her son's laptop would switch between them on its own.

The house has an Ethernet outlet in the upstairs hallway. That outlet is linked by cable to the spot near the router.

Proving the fix

You set up the mesh system. You plug the upstairs node into the hallway Ethernet outlet, so the nodes are linked by cable.

Now you want to show Dana it worked. In the bedroom, you run a speed test on her son's laptop. Then you run one more test right next to the main node downstairs.

Both tests show close to 290 Mbps. The video call stays smooth for an hour.