New build homes should have the best WiFi on the street. They have full fibre, modern wiring and none of the thick Victorian walls that trouble older houses. Yet some of the most frustrated calls we get come from new build estates around Bracknell, Wokingham and Reading.
The typical story: the fibre was live the day they moved in, the speed test next to the router is excellent, and the main bedroom on the second floor gets almost nothing. Video calls from the upstairs office drop. The TV in the living room buffers. The home is eighteen months old.
This is not bad luck, and it is rarely the internet provider’s fault. New builds are built in ways that make WiFi harder, and the developer usually fits only the bare minimum of network cabling. Here is why, and what fixes it.
Why new builds block WiFi
Foil everywhere
Energy rules have pushed builders towards insulation that works by reflecting heat. That usually means foil. It shows up in:
- Foil-backed insulation boards in walls and roofs
- Foil-faced plasterboard, particularly on external walls and in rooms in the roof
- Reflective membranes in lofts and dormers
- Insulated plasterboard between the garage and the house
Foil reflects radio signals almost as well as it reflects heat. A room lined with it behaves a little like a metal box. WiFi can still get in through doors and gaps, but much less of it does.
Coated glass
Modern double and triple glazing often has a thin metal coating to keep heat in. It also keeps WiFi in. That matters most for garden rooms, conservatories and anyone trying to reach a garden office from the house.
Underfloor heating and screed
Many new builds have underfloor heating on the ground floor, set in a layer of screed with metal pipes and mesh. Signal passing down from a first-floor router, or up from a ground floor one, has to get through all of that.
Metal studs and fire boarding
Some internal walls use metal studs rather than timber. Party walls in terraced and semi-detached new builds are built to fire and sound rules with dense boards. Each wall costs signal.
Three storey townhouses
A lot of new stock around Reading, Wokingham and Bracknell is three storey: living space on the ground or first floor, bedrooms stacked above. One router at the bottom of a tall, narrow house, with foil-backed boards between floors, rarely reaches the top.
The router in the cupboard
Developers bring the fibre in where it is easiest, usually the understairs cupboard, a utility room, a meter cupboard by the front door or the garage. The Openreach box goes there, the provider’s router gets plugged in next to it, and that becomes the only WiFi radio in the house.
A router inside a cupboard, surrounded by the consumer unit, the meter and the vacuum cleaner, is badly placed before any of the building materials come into it. We explain why this matters in why WiFi is slow with fast broadband.
The fibre box should stay where it is. The WiFi should not.
What we see on local estates
We will not name individual addresses, but the patterns are consistent by house type.
- Bracknell (Jennett’s Park, Buckler’s Park and the newer parts of Warfield). Mixed estates of semis and three storey townhouses. The townhouses are the problem: router on the ground floor, bedrooms two floors up through foil-backed boards.
- Wokingham (Arborfield Green, Shinfield and Montague Park). Many larger detached homes with rooms in the roof and garages converted to offices. The loft rooms and converted garages are the dead zones.
- Reading (Green Park Village and the town-centre riverside developments). Flats and townhouses with metal-framed walls and neighbours’ networks crowding the airwaves. Here interference from next door is as much a problem as walls.
The fix is broadly the same across all of them. The detail changes with the house.
Fixes that work, from cheapest up
1. Check for hidden cabling first
Many new builds already have Ethernet sockets in the living room, a bedroom or a study. Very often those cables end in a loose bundle in a cupboard, never connected to anything. Terminate them into a small patch panel and switch, and suddenly you have cabled points you did not know you had.
This is the first thing we look for on every new build visit. It is often the cheapest win available. More detail in data cabling.
2. Move the WiFi out of the cupboard
Leave the provider’s router where the fibre lands. Run one cable from it to a better location, such as a hallway ceiling or a landing, and put a proper access point there. This alone often fixes a two storey semi.
3. Mesh, placed properly
In a two storey home without cabling, a good mesh system can work well. The node positions matter more than the brand. Each node needs a clear path to the last, so put them on landings and in hallways, not in the far corners of rooms. See is mesh WiFi worth it for when it is the right call.
4. Wired access points on each floor
For three storey townhouses and larger detached homes, the reliable answer is a ceiling access point on each floor, each on its own Cat6 cable back to a switch. It gets past foil, screed and fire boarding because the cable carries the signal between floors. Why wired access points matter explains the difference.
New builds are often easier to cable than people expect. Lofts are clean and accessible, pipe boxing gives vertical routes, and service voids are common. Our guide to adding Ethernet without ripping up the house shows the techniques.
Garages, garden rooms and home offices
Converted garages are a common new build dead zone. They are usually on the far side of an insulated fire wall from the house. A cable from the network cupboard to an access point in the garage ceiling is almost always the answer.
Garden rooms and offices at the end of a new build garden face coated glass on the house and often on the cabin too. Mesh through two layers of coated glazing rarely holds a video call. See how to get internet to a garden office without dropouts and our garden office WiFi installation service.
If you have not moved in yet
The best time to fix new build WiFi is before you live there.
- Ask the developer if Ethernet is included, and where it ends
- Ask whether a data point can be added on each floor as an extra
- Arrange access between completion and move-in for cabling, before carpets and furniture
- Plan where a small network cabinet will live, ideally central and not in the garage
If you are planning points room by room, how many Ethernet points you need is a practical starting list.
Things that rarely help
- A faster broadband package. The fibre is already fast. The problem is inside the house.
- Plug-in extenders. They repeat a signal that is already weak, halve the speed and confuse devices.
- A new “WiFi 7” router in the same cupboard. Newer radios in the same place face the same walls.
- Turning the router up. Your phone still has to talk back, and its radio is much weaker.
Getting it sorted
Send us the house type, which floor the router is on, and a speed test from the room that fails. If you have Ethernet sockets, a photo of where the cables end in the cupboard is very useful. We will tell you whether it is a cabling, mesh or access point job, and quote before we book.
We install whole home WiFi across new build estates in Bracknell, Wokingham, Reading, Sandhurst and Camberley, and across the rest of Berkshire. Contact us to get started.