Fixing Poor Wifi

Introduction

We're very proud of our high speed Internet connectivity and WiFi guest experience here at Chale Bay Farm which surpasses that of many of our competitors, especially in such a rural location.

We've written a page about our journey with rural internet culminating with Starlink which we've now had installed since early 2022.  We've also written this page to complement the page about Starlink. These pages provide a lot of free advice based on our experience that may be useful to others with internet and wifi connectivity problems.

We currently use Starlink as our primary internet provider, backed up by mobile coverage from EE.  We use Unifi WiFi from Ubiquiti.  Prior to escaping the rat race to run our holiday letting business on the Isle of Wight we had long careers in technology and especially the Internet, so have all the skills to make things work well for us and our guests and provide advice and consulting to people with internet and wifi issues.

This page is a work in progress and we hope to add some supporting imagery and additional information in due course.

Important Terminology (WiFi is NOT the Internet)

Many people without a technical background often don't fully appreciate the difference between the Internet and their WiFi.  This probably comes about because traditionally Internet Service Providers (ISPs) have bundled three things together in one box commonly known as a "router".  The three things are the Internet connection, the "local area network" (LAN) and the gateway that links them together (this is the bit that is actually the router).  The LAN normally comes as WiFi, plus a handful of physical network ethernet ports may also be provided.

A few years ago bad WiFi didn't matter as much as it does now as WiFi was almost always much faster than the internet connection, so the interent connection was almost always the limiting factor.  Now, sicne the advent of so called "superfast" internet conenctions and beyond it can often be the other way around.

You can have very good WiFi and poor Internet connectivity, very good Internet connectivity and poor WiFi, or both.  The first step in solving problems is to know whether your issue is poor internet, poor WiFi or both.  Generally if you do a speedtest from a physically connected PC and it is good, whilst a speedtest from a WiFi connected device is only good near the "router" but deteriorates elsewhere in the property then the Internet is OK and the WiFi needs addressing.  If the speedtest is poor on a connected device or on a wifi device near the router then the Internet needs addressing.

For consistancy of measurement we have over the years used Ookla Speedtest which is available as a mobile App, on the web and also as a Windows App.

The rest of this page is about sorting out your local area network and especially WiFi.  If you need help with Rural Internet and especially Starlink then visit our Starlink Page.

Common Causes of WiFi issues

WiFi is a "line of sight" technology. The main fequencies used by WiFi are 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz  These are often referred to as the 2G band and the 5G band (not to be confused with 5G mobile signals which is totally different).  These travel in a straight line and their power decreases even through air, which is why the range even outside is a few hundred yards. When they hit an obstruction they get stopped a lot more quickly or even blocked totally.  Furniture and even the human body will degrade them a bit. In older buildings they struggle to pass through thick walls and especially stone walls of older rural properties.  In newer buildings they are often stopped by the metallic coatings of modern insulation materials.  2.4Ghz signals can penetrate better than 5Ghz signals.

The next issue is interference.  This can come in many forms.  In built up environments your WiFi can be interefered with by that of your neighbours. In rural environments this isn't such a big problem but you can still get interference from other sources like passing vehicle hotspots, but also household devices such as microwave ovens, which operate at nearly identical frequencies to the 2.4Ghz band at typically 2000 times the power of WiFi!  Although there are 11 usable 2.4Ghz channels (in fact 13 in the UK) they overlap each other slightky and so cause intererence.  For this reason most professionals consider only three channles properly usable (1,6 and 11) as they do not interfere with each other.  In the 5Ghz space there are many more channels although there are some limitations as some are available for all uses and thus increasingly contended whils others share frequencies with other uses like radar and have to automatically give way to radar (our installation is by the coast and some of our access points regualrly detect and change channel due to radar).

There can also be issues with devices in your own property creating their own wifi network, from IoT devices which leave their network running after you have set them up (even our Tesla Powerwall battery has done this), to devices like SkyQ.  Sky has the arrogance to think you will want to use their WiFi even if it is underperforming relative to a "proper" WiFi solution and they make it difficult for the non-technical user to turn off and Sky Q Miniboxes won't work with other WiFi (though they can be tricked).

Finally when you come to install a WiFi solution of your own you need to try to make sure that the different access points don't interfere with each other, by choosing channels and even adjusting powers settings.

Basic Solutions

There used to be lots of low cost extender solutions to WiFi, but now most people talk about "mesh".  We'll come on to mesh in a moment but for completeness let's first cover off the older solutions:

Basic extenders.  These work by listening to your main WiFi "router" and retransmitting the signal.  The main issue with these is they use half the available bandwidth for each hop, so in a big property with more than one extender you could be getting half, then a quarter then an eighth of the bandwidth; a second issue is people not properly undertstanding how they work positioning them in a part of the property which has a bad signal, whereas actually they ought to be positioning it about half way from the primary wifi device to the dead spot.  As well as the halving issue, some

Powerline extenders.  These work by superimposing a data signal on your house mains.  Over the years the speeds supported have increased and these still can sometimes be a viable option for some use cases.  However they do have issues in a lot of older building and especially large old buildings as some devices on the same ring main may interfere with them (especially plug-in rodent repellers that claim to repel rodents by creating unpleasant electromagnetic radiation), but also they may have difficulty crossing rings in a larger property with multiple ring mains.

Mesh as a Solution

The buzzword doing the rounds at the moment is Mesh. The technical use of the word "mesh" has somewhat been usurped by the marketeers to convey the idea that you put a number of devices around your property and they flood the environment with lovely juicy WiFi.  In practice a set of mesh units is like a set of intelligent extenders. One Mesh unit is typcially used as the master and plugged into the internet gateway (or may actually provide gateway functions of which more later).  The mesh units will use some of the available bandwidth to talk to each other to configure and make intelligent decisions on what channels to use and the best route to the gateway They will normally use the 5Ghz band where possible as the back channel for data.  This means that the bandwidth halving effect of a basic extender is minimised as the mesh dynamically works out the best path to transfer the data based on channel width and the demands of the various connected devices.  Some mesh systems provide other features such as guest networks and even content filtering.

Of course the intelligence comes at a price and although there are starter bundles many decent mesh systems are at least £50 a node with £100 plus commonplace.  One of the most popular systems at the time of writing is Tp Link's Deco system (of which there are various variants and prices available).

Sometimes people adding say a Deco Mesh to improve the Wifi Alongside a Starlink will find it doesn't seem to work when Starlink is set into Bypass mode. This is probably due to the gateway settings being incorrect, so we have created a page about gateways to explain it and basic configurations

Wired Connections

Although modern mesh solutions can do a very good job in a smaller property, Most professionals will almost always favour a mixed network with hard wired connections and wired WiFi access points (APs).  The reason for this is that the bandwidth available in the WiFi space can be dedicated entirely to providing the fastest possible connection to client devices with the "backhaul" to the gateway router and ondwards to the Internet.

One of the most popular solutions is the Unifi System from a company called Ubiquiti which sits nicely in the high end home owner/affordable professional sector.  For this reason it has become very popular for large residential premises and hospitality scenarios and is characterised by their flying saucer shaped access points which you can see in numerous pubs and reastaurants these days.  

Here at Chale Bay Farm we have a network which has grown from an initial 4 access points and basic unmanaged (dumb) swicthes to a total of 16 access points and 16 small managed (smart) switches covering our house and four holiday apartments small gym and outdoor spaces.  We've run the wired network throughout the loft spaces and the access points are out of sight in the lofts.  We deal with minimising interference through a mix of lowering power settings, channel choice and minimum RSSI setting to promote client devices to roam to the best device for any given lcoation in the property (a full explanation of which is out of scope of this page).  Unfi enables you to easily set up to four different wifi networks and as well as straightforward household networks you can have a  guest/hospitality network with basic axxess portal and if you have a Unifi gateway (the WiFi and physical network switches will work with other gateway products) you can have a a totally integrated system including intelligent firewall support and traffic monitoring.  You can even set up child friendly networks with content filtering and time of day limitations. Using slightly more complex configuration you can actually extend the number of networks and very recently we have created networks dedicated to each individual apartment - this enables guests to connect devices that can't see a normal commercial guest portal login in page like baby monitors and home assistants, knowing that these devices are secure from being eavesdropped by other guests.

This may sound a bit like an advert for Unifi - in some ways it is as it is affordable and very powerful; but like many systems it does have a lot of foibles!  There are of course other professional solutions available above Unifi and and more simple "unmanaged" physical network products; however Unifi is configurable and maintainable by tech savvy amateurs as well as professionals.  Pricewise a small basic set of Unifi components is likely to come in around the price of a mesh system comprised of 4 or 5 mesh nodes and ithat is probably the point at which a mesh system will be losing efficiency and wired access points will becoming more desirable as the "proper" solution.  To replace our system right now at current prices would probably cost around £4-5K (plus installation), though admittedly we have more APs than we strictly need because we often buy new APs and other components to test latest designs and improvements that we might be able to help others iwth and then leave them added into our system.

In the Starlink Context

In the context of Starlink, Starlink is slightly unusual compared with that from most ISPs as the standard hardware doesn't come with any physical ports.  This means that to install any additional network components including a third party mesh system like Deco or a Wired solution like Unifi you need to buy the Starlink ethernet adaptor.  

Once you have done this you can plug it straight into the WAN port of the network you are using. The complication then is how to configure it as there is a risk you have inadvertantly ended up with two Internet gateways in your network which in many cases means no client devices will be able to connect to the internet.

This is a sufficiently complex topic we have created a page explaining internet gateways.

In Summary

The quality of WiFi can be materially affected by interference, it being a "line of sight" technology where signals are signficantly blocked by thick walls and modern reflective insualtion materials, and with modern high speed internet connections it's the WiFi not ncessarily the internet connection that can often become the bottle neck

The WiFi capability of many "routers" provided by ISPs is often poor and supplementary or replacement WiFi is often required to spread WiFi throughout the entire property.  A wired solution will almost always be better but modern Mesh systems will often be adequate for small to medium sized properties and signficanty surpass the capability of older basic extenders and powerline adaptors. 

Decent WiFi isn't cheap though, but is still cheaper than a lot of other "utilities" if you compare it with getting your house replumbed or the eletricity rewired!