Why the office Wi-Fi is worse than the Wi-Fi at home

It isn't the internet connection

Nearly every Wi-Fi complaint we get called about turns out to be the local network, not the internet service. The giveaway: it's fine on a phone standing near the router and terrible at the back desk. Upgrading your NBN plan will not change that, though plenty of businesses try it first.

What's actually different about an office

• Density — twenty or thirty devices in a few rooms, all wanting airtime at once
• Materials — commercial fit-outs are full of concrete, steel studs, glass partitions and filing cabinets
• Traffic — video calls and large file uploads are constant, not occasional
• Interference — you can see six other businesses' networks from your desk, all on the same channels

Why extenders make it worse

A repeater talks to your devices and to the router on the same radio, roughly halving throughput each hop. Three of them chained together produce a network that shows full signal bars and doesn't work. Full bars measure the strength of the signal, not whether anything useful is getting through.

What a proper job looks like

• A signal survey of the actual tenancy, not a guess from the floor plan
• Access points positioned for coverage, usually ceiling-mounted, each cabled back to the switch
• A channel plan that works around the neighbours
• A separate guest network isolated from business traffic
• Central management so firmware updates and changes happen remotely

The one thing to do before you spend anything

Plug a laptop into the wall with a cable and run a speed test. If the cable is fast and the Wi-Fi is slow, it's the Wi-Fi, and it's fixable. If the cable is slow too, the problem is upstream and no amount of new access points will help.