Wi-Fi Dies Upstairs Every Afternoon

Size the real constraint first. Twenty desks, fourteen of them upstairs, sharing 40 Mbps down and 10 Mbps up. A group video call needs roughly 1.5–3 Mbps in each direction per participant, so three or four simultaneous calls already consume most of the 10 Mbps upload. Wi-Fi quality, not raw download speed, is what the complaints are about.

Compare on merit, not price.

• Range extender, ₹1,200. It repeats the same channel, so each packet crosses the air twice and throughput at the far end is roughly halved, while latency and jitter rise. Video is exactly the traffic that suffers. Cheapest, worst fit.
• Mesh kit, ₹9,000. Good roaming between nodes, but if the nodes backhaul to each other wirelessly on the same band, that backhaul consumes the same airtime the desks need. Acceptable for phones; weak for fourteen desks of calls.
• Powerline, ₹3,000. The floors are on different phases, so the signal may not cross the distribution board at all, and performance on shared circuits is unpredictable.
• Cat6 to a ceiling access point, ₹4,500. The access point gets a full-duplex wired link to the switch (four free ports are ample for one AP, a second AP later, and the printer), there is no shared-air backhaul, and placing the AP on the first floor means the concrete and the lift shaft stop being obstacles instead of being pushed through.

Recommendation: the wired access point, set to a different channel from the ground-floor router. It is ₹3,300 more than the extender but is the only option that removes the wireless bottleneck rather than sharing it.

The asymmetric link is the clue. The plan is 40 Mbps down but only 10 Mbps up. Scanned policy files are large, and the afternoon job pushes them out over that 10 Mbps upload.

What the saturation does to a call. Video conferencing sends a continuous stream of small packets in both directions. Once an upload fills the outbound queue, those small packets wait behind large bulk packets. The result is not 'less bandwidth' but delay and jitter - the call audio breaks up and the video freezes while a speed test still shows a healthy download figure. This queue build-up is commonly called bufferbloat, and it explains why the complaint is about calls and not about browsing.

Diagnostics that would confirm it.

• Run a speed test during the freeze: a healthy download with a poor ping/latency reading under load points to queueing, not to a dead connection.
• Watch the router's traffic graph while the upload runs.
• Repeat the call test with the upload paused; if the call clears immediately, the cause is confirmed.

Fixes in order of cost.

1. Enable QoS on the router so video-call traffic is prioritised and bulk transfers are capped.
2. Schedule large uploads outside call hours, or throttle the upload application.
3. Wire the heaviest users to the new first-floor access point.
4. Only then consider a plan with more upload - extra download would not help.

Note too that Wi-Fi is a shared medium: fourteen desks on one radio contend with each other regardless of the plan, so the wired AP helps twice.

Why a fixed address is needed. A printer left on DHCP may be handed a different address after a lease expires or a reboot, and every PC configured to send jobs to the old address fails. Some offices work around this by installing the printer on one PC and 'sharing' it, which breaks whenever that PC sleeps.

What not to do. Do not type 192.168.1.1 as the printer address. That is the router's own address, and two devices with the same address on one subnet cause an address conflict: the router and the printer both answer, and traffic to either fails unpredictably. Symptoms are intermittent printing and 'duplicate address' warnings in the router log.

What to configure on the printer (or via a DHCP reservation).

• IP address: something inside 192.168.1.0/24 but outside the DHCP pool, for example 192.168.1.20.
• Subnet mask 255.255.255.0 - must match the router, or the PCs will treat the printer as being on another network.
• Default gateway 192.168.1.1 - not required for printing, but needed for firmware updates and email-to-print.
• DNS: the router, or a public resolver.

The more robust alternative is a DHCP reservation on the router, binding the printer's MAC address to a fixed address, so the address is centrally documented and cannot collide with a device someone plugs in later.

Confirmation steps. From one PC: ipconfig to confirm the PC is on the same subnet, ping 192.168.1.20 for a reply, then open the printer's web interface in a browser and print a test page from two machines. Finally, check the router's client list to confirm no other device holds that address.