That’s a very good question, and it’s probably the most frequent issue that leads people to contact us. Imagine the following scenario: you live in a nice, cozy house in Osborne Village, and you decided to upgrade your internet connection. You want to have wireless in the entire house, and luckily for you, the high speed internet plan you chose comes with a free wireless router! You’re excited, the technician comes over, sets everything up, everything works, you’re happy!
And then, after the tech leaves, you go to try out your tablet in your bedroom, and it doesn’t work. Actually, it only works when you’re close to your brand new router. You walk over to the kitchen, and the signal is really low. How is that possible? The router is brand new!
We see these situations all the time. The reality is, most routers provided by an ISP free of charge will not be very powerful, nor will their configuration be ideal. If you’re living in a small apartment, with only a few devices connecting to the internet at a given time, it will work very well. Throw walls, floors, furnace piping and other obstacles into the mix, and things start getting weird.
Going back to the house mentioned in the first paragraph, that was an actual client. They had just put in high speed internet, with a free Wi-Fi router, but could only get reliable internet access very close to it. So, he went out, bought a nice, expensive router, followed the set up instructions to the letter. Now he could get a better Wi-Fi signal in his living room, but it was still terrible in his bedroom. However, the internet would not work when connecting to the new router. He called his ISP, which predictably blamed the new router. He was out of ideas, and so he called us.
After arriving at his home, we performed a detailed diagnosis, and, after a full reconfiguration, his internet worked perfectly on his new router and also in his upstairs bedroom, with a very strong and consistent signal!