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I've got a really weird & very specific problem on my hands, I'd appreciate any advice you might have!

In my home, there are many WiFi enabled devices, but I'll focus on a short selection of them.

My Sky Q router is under the open staircase in my house along with the TV and main Sky Q box. Little (if any) more than 10 meters away, at the top of the stairs, I have a mini Sky Q box, Fire TV stick and a PC.

Just FYI, in case it's important - my mini-ITX PC is equipped with these WiFi parts: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B01LCR1SKA/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o01_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1 https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B07N2SFZPX/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o01_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

The Sky Q mini box has an intermittent connection to the Sky Q hub and often disconnects, preventing me from using it until it can re-establish the connection. The Fire TV is almost never able to keep a connection to the router, and my PC is able to keep a 1MB/S connection (it should be between 4 and 5) to the router which is good enough for video streaming, but it's impossible to play even the simplest online game on and whenever I need to download large files it takes a long time and I constantly need to resume the download after an interruption.

The Sky Q repeater thing costs over £100 - and I'm sure they know where to shove it - plus my landlord has expressly told me in no unclear way that I am not to pass ethernet cables through the walls, ceiling or floor.

Also interestingly enough, BOTH 2.4 and 5GHZ bands are this bad. There's no discernable difference using one vs the other.

There's only 2 rooms in my house downstairs, the kitchen and the living room. The living room is where the router is located, so connections there are quite good, but the kitchen struggles too - not as badly as the upstairs, though.

I also happened to try using a TP-Link WR940N I had laying around in repeater mode, that actually made things worse as the connection was still slow & intermittent but the Sky Q mini box couldn't connect at all anymore until I turned the router off.

So I have a few questions about this:

  1. WHY could the connection be so poor at short range? There's nothing I've been able to find that should interfere so much and the signal needs only to pass through the floor to the next room up.
  2. Do you have any suggestions of how I can fix this? I'm a little bit stumped right now.

I'd very much appreciate any advice you have!

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  • What's the floor made of… in fact, what's the building made of… & the stairs…? I've seen builds made of drywall/plasterboard that use thermal boards throughout the building. That means every internal wall has two thicknesses of foil coating, making every room its own private Faraday cage.
    – Tetsujin
    Jul 20, 2020 at 11:36
  • "My Sky Q router is under the open staircase in my house along with the TV and main Sky Q box" <-- Make sure your TV is connected to the main network with Ethernet. Make sure boxes under the stairs are connected with Ethernet. Then try either the 2.4 GHz band only or the 5 GHz band only so that you are not using both bands.
    – John
    Jul 20, 2020 at 11:40
  • As far as I'm aware, the insides of the building are all wooden-framed and plaster-covered then painted. There's even PVC pipes in here, the only copper ones are for the heating. As for the outside and the walls between my house & the next, it's just regular red brick. I've helped to replace the floors in this house before and I never saw any kind of foil. Jul 20, 2020 at 11:40
  • I've just double-checked and the insulation in the loft is fibreglass, there's also some (although not much) down in the wall cavitity I can see from up there. There's no foil in there, though. Jul 20, 2020 at 11:52
  • I see 2 plans of action - 1) wander round the place with a laptop & an app that can measure signal strength, or 2) wire everything up as far as you can. Ethernet between access points. That's how I have to do it here, but I have brick internal walls too [one wall 'square' it can manage. At a 45° angle through the wall, it won't reach 5GHz at all & 2.4 is iffy.
    – Tetsujin
    Jul 20, 2020 at 11:58

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