You are on a call in the kitchen, you walk through to the study, and halfway down the hall the audio turns to porridge. Ten seconds later it comes back. Nothing has actually broken — the broadband is fine, no lights have changed on the router — but your Wi-Fi drops every time you move between rooms.

It is one of the most common complaints I get, and it is almost never a broadband fault. It is a roaming problem, and it is fixable.

Your phone decides which signal to use, not your router

This surprises people. You might have three access points or a mesh kit scattered around the house, but nothing in that kit gets to tell your laptop where to connect. The client device makes that decision itself, and most devices are stubborn about it. They hang on to the access point they first joined until the signal is genuinely dreadful, then scramble to find another one.

That scramble is the gap you hear on the call. Engineers call it a sticky client. You walked into the study two rooms ago, and your phone is still clinging to the access point in the kitchen because it was good enough right up until it suddenly was not.

Why older and larger homes make it worse

A lot of the houses I work in around Marlow, Cookham and Henley are solid brick, with chimney breasts, thick internal walls and the occasional bit of foil-backed insulation from a loft conversion. Signal does not fall off gently in a house like that. It falls off a cliff as you pass a wall. That is exactly the condition sticky clients handle worst: a strong signal, then a very weak one, with barely any middle ground in which the device can make a sensible decision.

Add a mesh kit that is repeating over the air rather than over cable, and every hop roughly halves your throughput as well. Now the Wi-Fi drops are joined by a general sluggishness that no speed test at the router will ever show you.

What a properly designed system does differently

The fix is not more signal. It is more thoughtful signal.

  • One network name everywhere. If you have separate names for upstairs, downstairs and the 2.4GHz band, your devices will never hand over cleanly. They treat each one as an entirely different network.
  • Transmit power turned down. Counter-intuitive, but access points shouting at full power make sticky clients considerably worse. Lower power and more access points give cleaner handovers.
  • Overlapping coverage, planned deliberately. You want each access point's usable edge to reach the next one, not a chain of isolated bubbles with gaps between them.
  • Wired backhaul wherever it is possible. An access point on a cable is worth two on a wireless hop, every time.
  • Fast roaming enabled. The 802.11k, v and r standards let the network nudge a device towards a better access point instead of waiting for it to work things out alone.

That is most of what I am doing on a site survey: working out where the walls actually are, where cable can realistically run, and how few access points will do the job properly.

Five things to check before you spend anything

  1. Are all your access points using the same network name and password? Merge them if not.
  2. Is anything repeating wirelessly that could be on a cable instead, even a short run through a cupboard?
  3. Are two units sitting far too close together, in the same room or either side of a stud wall?
  4. Is your main router tucked into a cupboard under the stairs or behind the TV? Metal and mirrors block signal worse than brick does.
  5. Has anything been updated in the last year? Roaming behaviour has genuinely improved in recent firmware.

Here is what I would actually recommend

If you live in a two-bedroom flat or a modern house under about 120 square metres, a decent consumer mesh kit with one unit on a cable will probably serve you perfectly well. I would rather tell you that than sell you something you do not need. The trouble starts when people try to cover a 300 square metre house, a garden office and a converted loft with the same three plastic pucks. That is where the Wi-Fi drops stop being occasional and become permanent residents.

Above that size, you want proper access points, mounted where the coverage needs to be rather than where the plug sockets happen to be, with cable running back to a central switch. It is not dramatically more expensive than a top-end mesh kit, and it behaves completely differently as you walk around.

If your Wi-Fi drops as you move around the house in Berkshire or Buckinghamshire, get in touch. The site survey is free, and I will tell you honestly if a simple change will sort it.