People are just realising a hidden material in the home is a real ‘Wi-Fi sucker’

IF you’ve had an extension on your home and noticed the Wi-Fi connection has gone downhill there may be a reason why.

All sorts of metal objects and material pose a real issue for broadband routers.

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Sometimes it’s something simple like a microwave.

But the material used in kitchen extensions has been revealed as another potential hidden Wi-Fi killer.

Amber Pine, Managing Director of Broadband and Talk at Sky told The Sun that people need to “think wisely” about where they put their hub, no matter who their provider is.

“The thing to watch out for is extensions,” she said.

“So the steel, particularly now with modern technology, you get those big beams that people use to do their kitchen extensions.

“If people put their hub in that space actually it’s incredibly hard for the hub to access the main home then because it then has to go through those steel beams.

“So just think wisely, I think, if you’ve done an extension where you’re going to put your hub afterwards and actually it might be worth doing a little bit of rewiring to make sure it’s in a really central place again if the extension has changed things.

“When you go through the MySky app we can give lots of advice around placement because that, nine out of ten cases, is when an engineer gets there, there isn’t actually a Wi-Fi problem, there’s a hub placement problem and people spend a lot of time thinking it’s speed or something wrong but actually it is that hub itself.”

There are other ways you can determine whether your box is in the right place.

One quick test is ensuring you can actually see the router.

Aman Bhatti, Director of Propositions for Broadband and Talk for Sky, recently said: “If you’ve got line of sight of the hub and it’s visible then the likelihood of the connection being strong is higher.

“And so things like storing it away in the cupboard and underneath the stairs for example, can cause some challenges with connections.”

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