Router in the basement: how to get Wi-Fi to the floors above

In many houses the internet line comes in through the basement, next to the electricity and gas meters. The installer puts the router right there, and the whole house above gets its Wi-Fi through a concrete slab. The basement has excellent coverage. Nobody lives there.

Why this is such a bad spot

• The ground floor is on the other side of the strongest floor in the house, often reinforced concrete. See Wi-Fi in the basement for the same physics seen from below.
• The upper floor is two floors away, and at a steep angle.
• Basement utility rooms are full of metal: meters, pipes, boilers, ducts, shelving.

No router is strong enough to fix this from where it stands. Distance and concrete win.

Separate the line from the Wi-Fi

The key idea: the modem has to stay where the line enters, but the Wi-Fi doesn't.

1. Run one Ethernet cable up. From the modem or provider's box in the basement to a spot in the middle of the ground floor, or near the stairs. Existing phone or data conduits, a utility shaft or a path next to pipes often make this easier than expected.
2. Put the router or main mesh unit at the top of that cable, high and in the open.
3. Turn off the Wi-Fi of the box in the basement, so your devices don't cling to a network they can barely hear.

One cable changes the whole house.

If a cable up isn't possible

• Powerline from the basement to the ground floor, with the router or an access point at the upper end. Results depend on the wiring; see powerline: when it works.
• Coax, if there's a TV outlet in the basement and upstairs.
• Router near the basement stairs, as high as possible, if everything else fails: the stairwell is the easiest path upward.

What not to do

• Don't add an extender on the ground floor to repeat a basement router it can barely hear. It will repeat a weak signal and the whole ground floor will look fine and feel slow.
• Don't buy a more powerful router for the same basement spot. It won't cross the slab much better.

Once the main unit is upstairs, cover the rest with the usual rules: see Wi-Fi weak upstairs, where to put your router, and, for mesh nodes, wired backhaul.

See the difference floor by floor

WiFi Heatmap maps each floor of the house separately. Map the ground floor and the upper floor with the router in the basement, then again after moving the Wi-Fi upstairs. It's usually the most dramatic before-and-after in home networking.