Post actualizado el día octubre 25, 2026 by DeiviSanzPlay
When the signal doesn’t reach the back bedroom, the temptation is to buy the cheapest repeater or the most expensive one. Before that, it’s worth understanding what can be solved without spending anything and when you have to open your wallet. In a large home the problem is almost never «lack of an extender,» but rather where the bottleneck is.
What you can achieve without paying a single euro (and what you can’t)
The router installed by the provider usually comes with features that many users never even open. According to the usual manufacturer documentation, most allow you to:
- Choose the channel manually on 2.4 GHz (the automatic setting sometimes picks one that’s saturated by the neighbors).
- Change the bandwidth: 20 MHz on 2.4 GHz gains stability even if it loses peak speed; 80 MHz on 5 GHz prioritizes throughput.
- Relocate the router: raising it to 1.5 m, away from thick walls and away from the microwave or the fish tank, changes more than it seems.
- Enable the 5 GHz band with a different SSID to force nearby devices to use it and decongest the 2.4 GHz one.
This works well in apartments of up to about 90 m² with brick partition walls. It doesn’t work when there are concrete floor slabs between floors, old load-bearing walls, or a kitchen with metallic tile in between: there the attenuation is so high that no software adjustment compensates for it.
The trick of using an old router as an access point
If you have an old router in a drawer, you can turn it into a wired access point. You connect an Ethernet patch cable from the main router to the old one, disable the latter’s DHCP, and give it an IP within the same subnet. The result is a second WiFi cell with the same speed as the cable, without repeating the signal over the air (which always loses half the bandwidth).
A typical case: a two-story home, the provider’s router in the ground-floor living room, and a network cable already run up to the upstairs office. Reusing a six-year-old router as an AP gives better results than a mid-range repeater placed in the hallway. The catch: it requires cable, and not everyone wants to drill.
When the expense is justified
The real leap in quality isn’t in the cheap repeater but in two technologies:
Mesh systems with dedicated backhaul
A kit of two or three nodes with its own backhaul channel (tri-band) maintains speed between hops. Budget dual-band models lose between 40% and 50% of throughput at each hop, a figure that rarely appears on the box. If you pay for 600 Mbps and the back node delivers 80, the problem wasn’t coverage but the backhaul.
PLC with a current standard
Powerline adapters from recent generations work acceptably if both outlets are on the same circuit and far from power strips with surge protection. In homes with old electrical wiring or with split residual-current breakers, performance drops to mediocre WiFi levels. It’s a lottery that can only be checked by trying.
Mistakes I see repeated
Placing the repeater where there’s already no signal is the most common one. The extender needs to receive a decent signal in order to amplify it; if you put it in the bedroom with no coverage, it will repeat noise. It should go halfway, at a point where the phone still shows two or three bars.
Another mistake: mixing brands in a mesh network. Proprietary protocols don’t talk to each other, and although the EasyMesh standard is advancing, interoperability between manufacturers remains inconsistent according to the compatibility notes published by the vendors themselves.
Quick comparison of cost and expectation
- €0 (adjustments + relocation): marginal improvement in medium-sized homes, none in homes with thick walls.
- €0 (old router as AP): excellent if cable is available; useless if it isn’t.
- €20-40 (basic repeater): covers a hallway, but reduces speed and adds latency. Not recommended for remote work with video calls.
- €100-250 (two-node mesh): the option with the best result-to-investment ratio in two-story homes.
- €60-120 (PLC): depends entirely on the electrical installation; it’s best to buy with a return option.
What I can’t promise you
No solution guarantees full coverage in a house with stone walls or buried basements. In those cases the honest thing is to consider structured cabling, which is more expensive to install but doesn’t age. And if the problem is the contracted speed, no extender will multiply it: it will only distribute better what already arrives.
Before buying, measure. A WiFi analysis app on your phone lets you see the signal strength (dBm) in each room. Below -70 dBm the experience degrades; above -60 dBm any device is overkill. With that data in hand, the decision between free and paid stops being a gamble.
