# Why your home Wi-Fi doesn't reach everywhere > Adding a repeater rarely fixes anything. Why your Wi-Fi dies in the attic or the utility room, what walls and floors actually cost you, and what does help. - **Published:** 2026-08-27 - **Language:** English (en) - **Canonical URL:** https://divsoftware.nl/en/blog/improve-home-wifi-coverage/ - **Keywords:** improve wifi coverage, wifi range, access point, mesh wifi, wifi dead spots - **Author:** Division Software — software studio in Eindhoven, the Netherlands - **Translation:** https://divsoftware.nl/blog/wifi-bereik-verbeteren-thuis/ --- Almost every house has that one spot: the attic where video calls stutter, the utility room where your phone drops back to 4G, the garden where the camera goes offline every five minutes. The reflex is to buy a repeater. Usually it doesn't help — and sometimes it makes things worse. It helps to know what is physically going on. ## Wi-Fi doesn't disappear, it gets eaten A router transmits at a limited power: in the Netherlands, at most 100 mW on 2.4 GHz and 200 mW on 5 GHz. That is set by regulation, so a "more powerful" router doesn't really exist. What changes from house to house isn't what the router sends out — it's how much of it survives the trip. That loss is measured in decibels (dB), and the rule of thumb is brutally simple: **every 6 dB halves your range**. What costs you what? | Obstacle | 2.4 GHz | 5 GHz | | -------------------------------- | ------- | ------ | | Plasterboard or wooden partition | ~3 dB | ~4 dB | | Brick interior wall | ~6 dB | ~10 dB | | Concrete or reinforced wall | ~12 dB | ~18 dB | | Concrete floor between storeys | ~18 dB | ~24 dB | | Closed meter cupboard door | ~8 dB | ~8 dB | So a single concrete floor costs you three halvings of your range on 5 GHz. That isn't a bad router, that's physics. ## The meter cupboard is the biggest culprit In most Dutch homes the router sits wherever the fibre or coax enters the building: the meter cupboard. That's almost always the worst possible place. You lose twice over: - **The cupboard itself** easily costs 8 dB — a closed door, often a metal meter box, sometimes a staircase around it. - **The position** costs you more again. The meter cupboard sits at the edge of the house, not in the middle. A router in the middle radiates mostly into the home; one in a corner sends three quarters of its signal into the garden and the neighbours' house. Together you can easily lose half your range before the signal even reaches the living room. The cheapest improvement available is therefore not a purchase but a move: get the router out of the cupboard, or hang a single access point in the hallway. ## Why 5 GHz is faster and still worse Higher frequencies are absorbed more strongly by materials. The same wall that costs 6 dB at 2.4 GHz costs around 10 dB at 5 GHz, and more again at 6 GHz. In the same room 5 GHz is several times faster — there is far more spectrum and far less neighbour congestion — but two walls away there is nothing left of it. The practical conclusion: **size your number of access points for 5 GHz**, and let 2.4 GHz cover the far corners and carry your smart home devices. Both bands come out of the same access points, so that costs you nothing extra. ## Repeater, mesh or access point? This is where most money gets spent badly. A **repeater** picks up your Wi-Fi and re-transmits it — on the same radio. Everything it passes on, it has to send twice. That halves your throughput and doubles your latency. On top of that, a repeater by definition sits where the signal is already weak, so mostly it repeats noise. **Mesh** does essentially the same thing, but tidily and automatically: your devices hand themselves over to the nearest node. That is a genuine improvement in usability, but the nodes still share the air with each other. With two nodes it's fine. With three or more, a growing share of the airtime goes to nodes repeating each other. An **access point with an Ethernet cable** shares nothing. Data arrives over the wire and the radio only has to transmit. From three points on, that is almost always the difference between "it works" and "it works well". The order that nearly always holds: 1. Move the router first. Free, and often enough on its own. 2. Run cable where you can. One Ethernet run upstairs beats three mesh nodes. 3. Choose mesh only where cabling genuinely isn't possible. 4. Only then buy anything extra. ## How many points do you need? That depends on your floor area, your storeys, your walls and where the router sits — and it can be worked out exactly. We built a free calculator that computes the real link budget instead of repeating a rule of thumb: [work out how many access points your home needs](/en/tools/wifi-coverage-planner/). As a rough indication for a typical Dutch terraced house with brick interior walls: one well-placed router covers the ground floor fine on 5 GHz, but rarely the second storey too. With concrete — flats, newer construction — you're quickly looking at three. ## Don't forget your smart home If you run Zigbee or Thread at home, there's one more thing: Zigbee shares the 2.4 GHz band with your Wi-Fi. If your Zigbee channel sits underneath an active Wi-Fi channel, the router transmits straight over the top of it — and Zigbee devices transmit at far lower power, so they lose that fight. The result is a sensor that goes 'unavailable' while your Wi-Fi looks perfectly fine. The [Zigbee channel planner](/en/tools/zigbee-wifi-channel/) puts the two side by side properly. ## In short - A "stronger" router doesn't exist; transmit power is capped by law. - Walls and floors cost dB, and every 6 dB halves your range. - The meter cupboard often costs you half your range. Moving it is free. - Repeaters halve your throughput. Wired access points don't. - Size your point count for 5 GHz; 2.4 GHz picks up the rest. Running into this and not keen on working it out yourself? We survey the house, decide where the points belong and wire them up where we can — on its own, or alongside a [smart home installation](/en/smart-home-installation/). [Request a free, no-obligation quote](/en/quote/). --- *This is the Markdown (AI-readable) version of an article by [Division Software](https://divsoftware.nl/) — we build websites, web shops, apps and custom software for businesses in the Netherlands. Read the full article at https://divsoftware.nl/en/blog/improve-home-wifi-coverage/, or request a free, no-obligation quote at https://divsoftware.nl/en/quote/.*