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4 min readOnce you've set up your home Wi-Fi in your new place, it's time to find a home for your router.
In general, your Wi-Fi router should sit in an open, central location with the fewest obstructions possible. Whether it's your living room, a home office, or another room, the fewer walls, levels, and barriers in the way, the better.
If you still aren't sure where to place your router in your new home, follow these rules to avoid deadspots and get the best coverage:
Your modem is like the internet's doorway into your home. It connects with the router which manages your Wi-Fi network and sends information to devices around your home.
Thankfully, your modem is a little less picky about where it lives but similar rules still apply but it's best to place it where you use your devices the most.
The best room for your router is one where it can sit off the floor, away from other electronics and obstacles like walls and pipes. This ensures its signal can reach as many rooms as possible.
While factors like your network jack and appliances can affect where your router goes, there are a few guidelines to follow to find the best spot.
To avoid dead spots, your Wi-Fi router needs to be as central as possible. Popular spots like living rooms, home offices, or bedrooms can be a good place to start, but the fewer walls the Wi-Fi signal has to pass through, the stronger the signal can be.
For two-story homes, choose the area where you and your family spend the most time.
Consider wired connections
Some home security systems and other electronics need a direct connection to your router. Consider a central area near other outlets where these kinds of devices can also fit.
Wi-Fi signals are strong enough to penetrate drywall and wood which is why you don't need a router in every room. But signals generally have a harder time with concrete, brick, and metal, which may explain dead spots in your basement or far corners of your home.
If you live in a basement apartment or area where these kinds of surfaces are unavoidable, we recommend checking out a mesh router for better coverage in those hard-to-reach areas.
Most surprising may be water and glass. Large mirrors, windows, other reflective surfaces can bend, reflect, and refract Wi-Fi signal just like light, and change the path of your Wi-Fi signal in your home.
Along with areas with water, concrete, brick, and metal, avoid these rooms when placing your router:
Upgrading into a larger home? You can take your internet with you to a new address, but if it's larger than 2,500 square feet, you may need a more powerful router to cover that space.
Your Wi-Fi router isn't the only device in your home that uses radio signals. Along with the devices it connects to, your router can compete with other appliances like microwaves, baby monitors, cordless phones, Bluetooth speakers, and more.
We recommend keeping your router a safe distance from other electronics in general which can interfere with its signal.
But some interference, like those from your neighbors, can't be avoided. If this becomes a problem, consider changing your Wi-Fi band channel to one your neighbor isn’t using.
And as a courtesy, don’t put your router right up against any common walls if you can help it.
Your modem’s location matters less than your router's. A modem usually hangs out near your main network jack. Most people keep their modem and router near each other for convenience, but that doesn’t have to be the case.
Even if you have a 2-in-1 modem and router or a gateway, you could get your own router and move it away from the modem if you need better Wi-Fi range. You’d just have to put the gateway into bridge mode using device settings so you don’t accidentally end up with two competing Wi-Fi networks.
The right internet speed for you depends on how many active devices are in your home at a given time. To start, we recommend around 10 Mbps per person with a device at a given time. But Netflix, for example requires at least 5 Mbps for HD content streaming.
If you and your family game online, stream content in different rooms simultaneously, or make video calls, might want to consider internet plans up to 1 Gigabit.
Wi-Fi boosters are good for stretching your signal into one annoying dead space, and mesh routers create a blanket of Wi-Fi signals from multiple points, which can eliminate dead zones in even the biggest homes. A single router can do only so much, even if it’s in the best location in your house.
The first thing to try to get rid of a pesky dead spot or two is get a Wi-Fi booster. A Wi-Fi booster catches your existing Wi-Fi signal and stretches it a bit further by redistributing the signal.
If you need a bit more oomph to fill your space, a mesh Wi-Fi system like Google Nest Wifi is probably your best bet. These are made up of multiple routers that work together to cover your home in a blanket of Wi-Fi—so you don’t have to worry as much about finding one central location for your router. Mesh systems are best for large homes or homes with difficult layouts (say, you have a bunch of brick walls that Wi-Fi can’t get through).
If you want wide coverage, keep your antennas straight up. If you want tall coverage—like if you’re in a multi-story home—lay an antenna on its side.
Router antennas are usually omnidirectional, meaning that they spread Wi-Fi in an even plane around the antenna. The signals usually spread out and down, not up. But if you lay an antenna down, it spreads the signals up and down rather than out.
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