When someone says "the Wi-Fi feels slow"

"The Wi-Fi feels slow" is almost never about the Wi-Fi.

It's usually one of four things, and you can rule them out before you log into anything. Here's the checklist I run, sharpened on tickets I shadowed during my internship at Sir Robert McAlpine and now battle-tested every weekend in my homelab.

1. Is it actually the Wi-Fi?

Plug the laptop straight into the switch with a cable. If it's still slow, it isn't a wireless issue — it's the link, the device, or whatever they're trying to reach.

I was on a McAlpine site once where three users had complained their Wi-Fi was "rubbish for a week." A wired laptop showed exactly the same speeds. The actual problem was upstream of the building. Wi-Fi got the blame because Wi-Fi is the visible thing.

2. Where is the user sitting?

Roughly half of the "Wi-Fi is broken" tickets I've seen come from someone who quietly moved desks. Two walls and a printer between them and the access point is enough to drop a phone call. Look at a floor plan, not a packet capture.

Once you've seen what an enterprise WAP's coverage radius actually looks like — which the homelab has hammered into me, since cheap APs are hilariously weaker than the gear in a real office — the floor-plan check becomes second nature.

3. What does "slow" mean?

"Slow to load a page" is a different problem from "slow to upload a 2 GB file" which is a different problem from "Teams call drops every Tuesday at 10:30." Get one specific, repeatable example.

A real one I sat in on at McAlpine: Teams dropping every Tuesday around 10:30. Turned out a backup job was hammering the same uplink during the same window. Once you knew the symptom and the timing, the cause picked itself out.

The example that matters is never "everything is slow." It's something that someone, somewhere, is trying to do right now and can't.

4. Is anything else loud on the network?

A single laptop pulling a 60 GB OS update can ruin everyone's day on a small site. Switch port stats and per-WAP client counts answer this in seconds — assuming someone bothered to set up the management interface.

This is part of why I've put a Pi-hole at the centre of my homelab. It logs every DNS query on the network. When something feels slow, I can see in plain text that the user's laptop has fired off two thousand requests to a telemetry domain in the last minute. Mystery solved before I've even touched the router.

Only then

If those four don't crack it, then I start looking at signal strength, channel utilisation, DHCP leases and DNS. By that point I've already saved myself an hour of poking at settings that were never the problem.

Most support work is like this: a small amount of careful thinking up front saves a lot of frantic fiddling later. Same on the ramp at Luton, same on the helpdesk, same in my own flat.