Kitchen Cure for Poor Wifi Connection

Friday I was in online video sessions where a couple of people had to choose between having a solid wifi connection in a room that is terribly frigid during this cold snap, or being in a warm room but falling out of the video session.

Let’s take a break from larger issues. If the same problem is vexxing you, let’s see if we can solve it with something you have on hand. Don’t leave home in a pandemic to get a signal booster (or order one delivered) unless this cheap solution fails to do the trick.

Kitchenware to the Rescue

Go to your kitchen. Look for a metal roasting pan. Ours is a couple of inches deep with a graceful curve from the bottom to the sides, but get what you can find. It has to be metal and able to take up a fair portion of an oven shelf. No roasting pan? Try a cookie sheet. It might be brown from years of use. That’s okay.

Go to the warm room with poor wifi signal where you would like to be able to do whatever you do online. Set up your PC, tablet computer, phone… whatever you want to use online.

Imagine a straight line from the device to your wifi router, through walls or floors or whatever. Prop up your metal pan from the kitchen next to your device on the other side from the wifi router. Set it up as though it is a mirror and you want to bounce the wifi signal back to your device.

Imagine that because it’s exactly what you’re doing. You’re bouncing it over such a short distance that the time lag between original signal and bounced signal at your device is too small to matter. It’s as though you boosted the signal.

It may be enough to keep you from falling offline in the middle of video meetings and work sessions.

Not Just Theoretical

This is what I did at a previous house where my home office got poor signal. It isn’t what a computer store would sell you as a conventional solution. It’s cheap, easy, reliable (our roasting pan never breaks), out of view of the camera when you’re in a video meeting.

Try it. May you get to go online in a comfortably warm room from now on.