Router in a cabinet: how much Wi-Fi are you losing?

Routers are not pretty, and they come with a tangle of cables, so they end up inside the TV stand, a closet or a drawer. It's one of the most common reasons a home has Wi-Fi that's fine in the living room and poor everywhere else.

What the cabinet actually does

The door itself is rarely the main problem. A thin wooden panel costs little. What hurts is everything that comes with the cabinet:

• Height. Cabinets are low. A router near the floor sends much of its signal into the floor and the furniture around it.
• The wall behind it. Pushed against the back panel, the router loses the half of its coverage that points into the wall.
• The neighbors. TVs, consoles, speakers and power strips are packed with metal. A router behind a TV is sitting behind a large metal screen.
• Metal or glass doors. Metal fronts, and glass doors with metal frames or tinted coatings, block far more than wood.
• Heat. Electronics in a closed box run hotter, and some routers become less stable when they do.

Put together, the cabinet can cost the far rooms a lot more than the living room ever notices.

Test it in two minutes

Before you rearrange the furniture, check whether it matters in your home:

1. Go to the room with the worst Wi-Fi and check the connection there.
2. Open the cabinet door, or put the router on top of the cabinet, and wait a minute.
3. Check the same room again, in the same spot.

If the far room improves clearly, the cabinet was part of the problem. If nothing changes, the issue is distance or walls, and you can keep the router hidden.

Ways to hide it without losing coverage

• On top instead of inside. The top of a bookcase or tall cabinet is one of the best spots in the room: high and open.
• Open shelf. A shelf without doors, at chest height or above, keeps things tidy and the signal free.
• Move the router, keep the box. If the modem or fiber box must stay in the cabinet, connect the router to it with an Ethernet cable and put the router somewhere better. A flat cable along a skirting board is nearly invisible.
• Turn off the provider's Wi-Fi. If your provider's box has to live in the cabinet, disable its Wi-Fi and add your own access point or mesh unit outside, connected by cable.
• Wall-mount it. Many routers have mounting holes on the back. High on a wall, near the middle of the home, is ideal.

See where to put your router for choosing the spot itself, and what walls do to the signal if the far rooms are behind masonry.

Check the result, not the feeling

"It seems better" is easy to believe after moving something. WiFi Heatmap maps the home room by room, so you can survey once with the router in the cabinet and once outside it, and compare the two maps side by side. The difference, or the lack of one, is right there.