In short
WiFi dead spots are made by the building, not the router: brick and blockwork walls, foil-backed insulation, metal racking, lift shafts, coated glass and suspended ceilings all absorb or reflect signal. The fix is an access point positioned for the dead area, placed from a measurement rather than a guess.
Turning up the power or adding a repeater rarely works, because a dead spot is a geometry problem, and neither changes the geometry.
Every office has the corner. The meeting room where calls go to die, the far end of the floor where laptops show one bar, the kitchen where the signal simply stops. Everyone knows where it is, everyone routes around it, and every attempt to fix it so far has involved buying something and hoping.
Dead spots feel mysterious but they are not. They are physics, and the physics is knowable, measurable and fixable. This is what actually causes them, why the popular fixes disappoint, and what the measured route to a permanent fix looks like.
What actually creates a dead spot
WiFi is radio, and radio loses energy every time it passes through or bounces off something. A dead spot is simply the place where the losses add up to more signal than a device can use. The usual culprits in a commercial building:
- Brick, blockwork and concrete walls, which soak up signal far faster than plasterboard
- Foil-backed insulation and plasterboard, which reflect it like a mirror
- Metal racking, shelving, ducting and lift shafts, which block and scatter it
- Coated or tinted glass partitions, which attenuate more than ordinary glass
- Kitchens and plant rooms, where appliances and machinery add interference on top
- Distance itself, especially on 5GHz, which carries more data but travels less well through obstacles
Two of these stacked between a desk and the nearest access point is usually enough. This is why dead spots so often appear after a refit: a new partition or a new run of racking changes the geometry, and a layout that worked stops working.
Why the popular fixes disappoint
Turning the power up
Transmit power only helps in one direction. The access point shouts louder, but the laptop in the dead spot still whispers back at the same strength, so the link stays broken. Maxed-out power also bleeds signal into your neighbours' space and theirs into yours, which can make the wider network worse.
Plugging in a repeater
A repeater rebroadcasts what it can hear, and it is sitting near the dead spot precisely because the signal there is poor. Repeating a weak signal produces a louder weak signal, and it halves the airtime for every device using it. In a home, sometimes fine. On an office floor, rarely.
Moving the router
In a small unit this occasionally works, and it is free, so it is worth the five minutes. But most offices run from an access point whose position was chosen by whoever fitted the ceiling, and moving it a metre does not undo a blockwork wall.
The measured fix: find the hole, then fill it
The permanent fix is almost always an access point positioned for the dead area, cabled back to the switch, on a channel plan that does not fight the rest of the network. The word doing the work in that sentence is positioned, and position comes from measurement.
A wireless survey walks the floor with survey tools and maps signal strength, interference and channel overlap against the actual layout, racking, partitions and all. The output is a heatmap that shows the dead spot as a hole in the coverage, exactly where its edges are, and what is casting the shadow. From there the design is straightforward: where the new access point goes, where the cable route runs, and what channels everything should sit on so the new unit adds coverage instead of contention.
Sometimes the survey says something cheaper than expected: an existing access point buried above a suspended ceiling tile, boxed in by a refit, that just needs relocating. That is the other value of measuring first, it stops you buying kit you already own.
How Core Comms can help
We design and install business WiFi across Manchester, the North West and West Yorkshire, and every dead-spot job starts with the survey rather than a quote: we map the floor, show you the hole in the coverage, and fix it with the smallest change that closes it. If that is one relocated access point rather than three new ones, that is what we will recommend. The cabling behind the fix is handled by the same team, because an access point is only as good as the data cabling feeding it.
If your office has the corner everyone complains about, talk to our team or call 0330 838 1000 and we will measure it before anyone spends anything.
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