It’s a story as old as time. I moved into a new place with great fiber internet - but the modem is in the garage, my desktop PC is not, and the place is a rental so I have limited options for making modifications. The signal is not bad, but I’m getting dropouts.

Since the PC and router are fixed in place I thought maybe a directional antenna or two would help? 5GHz directional antennae are kinda scarce which makes me wonder if I’m on the wrong track. Does this new “beamforming” thing supersede directional antennae?

I have 802.11ax (a.k.a. Wi-Fi 6) on both sides of the connection. Maybe I could upgrade to Wi-Fi 6E and give 6GHz a go? Maybe that would be worse due to the intervening wall…

  • Cable is always the best option for speed, thought it is a bit of a pain in the arse to set up.

    The problem with things like power line extensions and wifi extenders is that you have no guarantee it will solve the problem as you may have a huge amount of noise in the power-lines that kills transmission bandwidth.

    There are signal strength apps available that allow you to map the dead spots and try and fix the penetration issue.

    A simple test is a steel wok, use it to focus the signal towards the pc (this will block the signal in the other direction) this will give you the highest penetration with the standard setup and it may solve the problem.