Full bars in the lounge, nothing in the back bedroom, and the laptop in the home office drops off every video call. Wi-Fi dead zones are the most common home network complaint we hear across Melbourne, and most of them are not fixed by a new router. At Dtech IT Solutions we see the same handful of causes week after week, so here is how to work out which one you have and what actually fixes it.
What a dead zone actually is
A dead zone is any spot where your device can still see the network but cannot hold a useful connection. The phone shows one bar, pages half load, and a video call freezes every few minutes. It is rarely a complete blackout. That matters, because a weak-but-present signal is exactly the situation where a device keeps trying to use the far-away router instead of giving up, and that is what makes the whole house feel slow.
Wi-Fi is radio. Every wall, floor, mirror, fish tank and fridge between the router and your device takes a slice of the signal. Distance takes another slice. Other networks nearby take a third. By the time the signal reaches the back bedroom of a long Melbourne block, there is often not enough left to carry a 4K stream or a Teams call, even though the NBN connection at the front of the house is fine.
1. The router is in the wrong spot
The NBN installer put the connection box where the old phone line came in, which is usually the front wall, the garage or a hallway cupboard. The router went next to it, on the floor, behind a door, sometimes inside a cabinet with the modem. Wi-Fi radiates outwards in a rough sphere, so a router at the front of the house sends half its signal into the street.
The fix is boring and free. Get the router up on a shelf or a desk, in the open, as close to the middle of the home as the cable allows, and away from the TV, the microwave and the metal fridge. If the NBN box has to stay where it is, a longer Ethernet lead between the box and the router lets you move the router without touching the NBN side at all. We do this on a large share of home network setups and it is often the whole job.
2. Your walls are eating the signal
Melbourne housing works against Wi-Fi. Double brick in the inner suburbs, rendered blockwork in the newer estates, foil-backed insulation in roofs and walls, and the steel frames in many townhouses all absorb or reflect the signal. A single plasterboard wall costs you a little. A double brick wall with a steel door frame can cost you most of it. Two-storey homes add a floor with ducting and sometimes a concrete slab in between.
You cannot change the walls, so the answer is to stop asking one router to punch through all of them. Either move the router so the signal travels along the house rather than across the thickest walls, or add a second access point on the far side of the obstruction. Which brings us to the question of how to connect that second point, covered below.
3. You are on the wrong band
Nearly every router broadcasts two networks: 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz (newer ones add 6 GHz). The 5 GHz band is fast but does not travel well through walls. The 2.4 GHz band is slower and crowded, but reaches further. Many routers combine both under one name and let the device choose, and devices choose badly: a phone will cling to a weak 5 GHz signal from the lounge long after the 2.4 GHz band would have given it a better connection.
- If your router shows two network names, connect far-away or low-traffic devices (printers, smart plugs, the TV in the back room) to the 2.4 GHz one and keep laptops and phones near the router on 5 GHz.
- If it shows one combined name, look in the router settings for “band steering” or “smart connect”. Turning it off and naming the bands separately gives you control back.
- On a phone, forgetting the network and reconnecting in the dead zone forces it to pick the band that actually works there.
4. The neighbours are on your channel
In an apartment block or a street of townhouses you can see twenty or thirty networks from your couch. On 2.4 GHz there are only three channels that do not overlap, so most of those networks are shouting over each other. The symptom is a connection that looks strong but still stutters, worst in the evening when everyone is home streaming.
Most routers are set to “auto” channel selection and never re-check after the first boot. Log in to the router, set the 2.4 GHz channel to 1, 6 or 11 (whichever a free Wi-Fi analyser app on your phone shows as least used), and set the 5 GHz band to a channel in the 36 to 48 range if your neighbours are mostly on the higher ones. A five minute change that regularly turns a “dead” room into a usable one.
5. The NBN router is doing too much
The router that came free with the NBN plan is built to a price. It handles the internet connection, the firewall, the Wi-Fi and often the phone line, with a small set of antennas and a modest radio. For a one bedroom unit it is fine. For a family home with thirty connected devices, a games console, two work laptops and a doorbell camera, it is the bottleneck, and no amount of repositioning will change that.
The usual move is to leave the NBN router doing the internet side and switch its Wi-Fi off, then add a proper Wi-Fi system behind it. That way the provider’s router stays supported for the connection and you get real coverage from hardware designed for it. If the router is also acting as your home phone base, that keeps working too.
How to find your dead zones in ten minutes
- Run a speed test standing next to the router. That number is your best case; write it down.
- Walk to each room where people actually use the internet and run the same test in the spot they sit. Note the room, the band if your phone shows it, and the speed.
- Any room under a quarter of the best-case speed, or where the test fails to start, is a dead zone. Note what is between it and the router: how many walls, what they are made of, whether there is a floor in between.
- Repeat at 8pm. If the evening numbers are much worse than the daytime ones, congestion from neighbours or from your own household is part of the problem, not just coverage.
That little map tells you which cause you are dealing with. One bad room behind a brick wall is a placement or second-access-point problem. Everything slow in the evening is congestion. A whole floor missing is almost always the router’s radio running out of reach.
Fixes, cheapest first
- Move the router: open shelf, middle of the home, away from metal and the microwave. Free.
- Split the bands and fix the channels. Free, fifteen minutes in the router settings.
- Update the router firmware. Older NBN routers shipped with Wi-Fi bugs that later updates fixed. Free.
- Run one Ethernet cable to the far end of the house, through the roof space or along the skirting, and put a second access point there. This is the single most effective thing you can do in a brick home.
- Use the existing phone or coax cabling with adapters where a new cable is not practical, which is common in older Melbourne homes with phone points in every room.
- Replace the free router’s Wi-Fi with a mesh system sized for the home. The most reliable fix for two-storey and double brick houses.
Mesh or extender
A plug-in range extender listens to the router and repeats what it hears. It has to receive and resend every packet on the same radio, so anything connected through it gets roughly half the speed, and it only works at all if you plug it in somewhere the signal is still decent, which is usually not the room with the problem. Extenders also create a second network name, so your phone keeps hopping between the two.
A mesh system is two or three units that work as one network under one name. The units talk to each other on a dedicated radio or, better, over an Ethernet cable, and hand devices between them as you move around. Set up properly, a three-unit mesh covers a typical two-storey Melbourne home with no dead zones and no speed penalty. The catch is that units placed too far apart, or on opposite sides of a brick wall, end up with the same problem the router had. Placement still matters, it just becomes easier to get right.
If the Wi-Fi fix exposes a different problem, such as a laptop that is slow everywhere, our guide on why a computer is slow covers the five causes we see most. And if the home is also an office with staff logging in remotely, it is worth a look at what managed IT support in Melbourne includes, because network reliability is usually the first thing we fix for a new small business client.
Frequently asked questions
Will a faster NBN plan fix my dead zones
No. The plan speed is how fast data arrives at the front of the house. A dead zone is the signal not reaching the back of the house. Upgrading the plan without fixing the Wi-Fi just means the lounge gets faster and the bedroom stays the same.
Does a Wi-Fi 6 or Wi-Fi 7 router reach further
Not meaningfully. The newer standards are faster and handle more devices at once, but they still obey the same physics through brick and concrete. Better coverage comes from more access points in the right places, not from a newer single router.
Can I keep my provider’s router and still use mesh
Yes. Leave it connected to the NBN and switch off its Wi-Fi, then plug the first mesh unit into one of its network ports. This is the setup we recommend most often because the provider keeps supporting the connection while you get proper coverage.
How long does a professional Wi-Fi fix take
A site check, router relocation and settings tidy-up is usually under an hour. Running a cable through the roof and installing a mesh system is normally a half day visit for a standard home in Melbourne or Geelong.
Tired of the one room where the internet never works? Dtech IT Solutions can map the dead zones and fix them in one visit. Book online or call 03 7033 2634 · 8am to 8pm, seven days.
Related: Home and Business Network Setup · IT Support Melbourne · Computer Repairs Melbourne · Why is my computer so slow