There’s always one room. The back bedroom, the basement, the rear balcony: the place where video starts stuttering and calls freeze. Before buying anything, it’s worth understanding why.

Why the signal dies

Wi-Fi is a low-power radio wave. It struggles with two things: metal and water. Montréal homes are full of both — wire lath under the plaster in older buildings, ductwork, plumbing, refrigerators, brick walls, concrete floors in condos.

Railroad apartments are the classic case: long and narrow, with the router at one end because that’s where the provider’s cable comes in. The signal then has to cross four or five partitions along the worst possible axis.

The second factor is frequency. Your router broadcasts on two bands. The 5 GHz band is fast but stops dead at walls. The 2.4 GHz band travels much further but is slower, and it’s crowded — microwaves, cordless phones and every neighbour’s network are all in there. In a Montréal apartment building, seeing twenty networks from your living room is normal.

What to try first, for free

Move the router. This is the single most effective change and it costs nothing. A router should be up high, out in the open, as close to the centre of the home as possible. Inside a cabinet, behind the TV, or on the floor in a corner, it loses much of its reach. If the provider’s cable is too short, an extension coaxial or Ethernet cable costs about twenty dollars and can change everything.

Restart it, but properly. Unplug the router and the modem, wait thirty seconds, plug the modem back in first, wait for it to settle, then the router.

Check its age. A router handed out by your internet provider eight years ago is not doing the same job as a current model. Wi-Fi hardware ages, and the standards have moved on considerably.

Test in the right places. Run a speed test next to the router, then in the problem room. If speed is excellent near the router and miserable at the back, it’s a coverage problem — not a subscription problem. Paying for a faster plan will change nothing.

Extenders: why they often disappoint

An extender — the small box you plug into an outlet halfway down the hall — picks up the signal and rebroadcasts it. On paper, perfect. In practice, there are two problems.

First, it roughly halves your throughput, because it has to receive and retransmit in turn on the same radio. Second, it usually creates a second network with a different name, and your phone stubbornly clings to the main network at one bar of signal instead of switching over.

An extender can rescue a small blind spot near the edge of your coverage. It is not a solution for a whole floor.

What actually works

A mesh network. Two or three units, one network name, one password. Your devices hand off between them without your noticing, the way a cell phone changes towers. This is the right answer for the large majority of homes with more than one floor or more than about a thousand square feet. Placement matters: the second unit belongs where the first one’s signal is still decent, not where it’s already dead.

Ethernet cable. Unglamorous, unbeatable. If you can run a cable to the office, the basement or the living-room TV, do it: the connection will be faster and steadier, and it frees up Wi-Fi airtime for the devices that have no choice. Flat cable tucks under baseboards or a rug.

Powerline adapters. Two adapters that carry the network through your electrical wiring. Useful when running a cable is impossible — in a triplex, for instance. Results depend entirely on the state of the wiring: excellent in some homes, disappointing in others. Buy from a retailer that accepts returns.

Two settings that help, whatever the hardware

Give your network a clear, distinctive name rather than keeping the one printed on the router’s label. Use WPA3 encryption if it’s offered, otherwise WPA2 — never WEP, which offers no real protection any more.

And create a guest network. Visitors get online without your main password, and it’s also the right place for connected devices — thermostat, doorbell, bulbs — so they aren’t sitting on the same network as your computers.

When to call someone

If you’ve moved the router, tested speeds, and the back of the home is still unusable, an on-site diagnosis measures the signal room by room and tells you exactly how many units you need and where they belong. At QC Tech Support that’s $100/h in Montréal and the surrounding area, plus the $75 travel fee.

Wi-Fi dead zones: what actually works