What are some tips for improving Wifi coverage?

There are a number of things that you can try to help improve your Wifi coverage in your property.

Wifi is now critical in a household where numerous devices rely on good quality wifi to operate.

1. Location of your Wifi router

This is likely the most important part of ensuring you maximise the Wifi coverage inside your property. Ensure that the Wifi router is located in a central position within your house, this will give the greatest all round coverage. When you connect to one of our nbn® plans for the first time, you may have to connect to a different socket or in a different room in the house. If required you may need to invest in home wiring to relocate the router to a more central position. For nbn® connections using HFC technology, often the nbn® box can be installed at the front or back of the house - in these cases we recommend investing in cabling to get your modem to a central position in your property.

2. Consider upgrading your modem hardware to the Google Nest Wifi

To improve or extend the Wifi network throughout your residence, you can purchase a Google Nest Wifi router by itself, or one or two points which you can place throughout your house so that the signal reaches further.

3. Try alternative Wifi channels

Most Wifi routers will support a number of different Wifi channels. This can help if there are other Wifi networks nearby from neighbouring properties. Microsoft have launched a tool called Wifi Analyzer to help identify the best channel for your needs.

4. Avoid interference

Certain appliances in the home can cause interference. This can include microwaves, cordless phones and other radio equipment. Try relocating your Wifi router away from these devices to see if this improves performance. It's recommended to purchase a dual band Wifi router. This can help in instances where interference is an issue.

5. Keep your Wifi password secure

If a neighbour has hijacked your Wifi connection they may be consuming all your bandwidth. Ensure that you use a Wifi password and ensure that it is not an easy one to guess - like 'password'.

6. Control your bandwidth

If you are suffering from slow speeds on your wifi - check what other devices are connected to the network and what they are doing. They may be downloading heavily which could be affecting your wifi performance on other devices.

7. Consider a new Wifi router

If you're still using an old router, you may wish to consider an upgrade. Wifi technology is constantly evolving and improving and a new device may improve your signal strength and Wifi data transfer speeds.

8. Check your Wifi router firmware is up to date

Most router manufacturers will update their on-board firmware. This is the software used to run the device. From time to time this software will be updated to improve the performance of the router.