Fixing the Wi-Fi at your parents' house

Sooner or later you spend a Sunday afternoon fixing Wi-Fi at your parents' place. The constraint is unusual: whatever you build has to keep working when you're 500 km away and support is a phone call at dinner time.

Optimise for "still works in six months"

That single rule changes most decisions:

• Fewer boxes is better. Every extra device is something that can be unplugged by accident, moved during cleaning, or blamed for an unrelated problem.
• No clever setup. Guest networks, per-device rules and second names create questions you'll have to answer by phone.
• Label everything. A piece of tape saying "do not unplug" on the router and each node prevents the most common failure of all.
• Write down the network name and password and leave it somewhere visible — inside a kitchen cupboard door works better than a drawer.

The order of work

1. Find out what they actually use. Usually a TV, a tablet, a phone, maybe a video-call setup with grandchildren. Coverage matters exactly where those live and nowhere else.
2. Look at the router first. In older homes it is usually on the floor, behind furniture, in the hallway where the line arrives. Raising it and clearing the space around it is free: see router height and the router in the cabinet.
3. Walk the rooms and measure, so you know whether the problem is the far bedroom or the whole flat.
4. Only then add hardware. One access point or mesh node in the right spot beats two in convenient sockets; see where to put mesh nodes.
5. Check the TV and the video-call device by actually using them, not by looking at the bars.

Things that come up often in older homes

• Thick walls. Pre-war and rural houses have masonry that modern kit doesn't fix by being newer: see what walls do to Wi-Fi.
• The phone-socket corner. The line arrives in the hallway or an entrance closet, the worst place in the house for radio. See internet line in the wrong corner.
• An ancient router from the provider. Often the single cheapest fix, and often free on request: see when the provider's router is the limit.
• One device pulling everyone down. An old tablet hanging on at the edge of range slows the rest: see when one slow device affects everyone.

Leave a note, not a mystery

Before you go, write three lines: what the network is called, what to do if the internet stops (unplug the router, wait a minute, plug it back in — see restarting the router), and which box must never be moved. That note prevents more calls than any hardware.

Measure while you're there

You get one visit, so make it count: map the flat with WiFi Heatmap while you're on site. You'll leave with a picture of the coverage, which means the next phone call about "the internet is broken" starts from evidence instead of guesses.