Wi-Fi in Leith is genuinely harder than in most parts of Edinburgh, and it's not the fault of your router. The building stock here — long tenements up Leith Walk and Easter Road, warehouse conversions round the Shore, and steel-and-concrete waterfront blocks at Ocean Terminal and Western Harbour — was designed with a lot of considerations in mind, and Wi-Fi propagation was not one of them. The router that works fine in a Newington maisonette will struggle here for reasons that have nothing to do with its spec sheet.
This guide is what we walk into on a Leith Wi-Fi callout: why the coverage is patchy, how to tell which type of Leith flat you're actually dealing with, the one fix that solves most cases, and when you genuinely need mesh or a wired access point instead.
Why Leith Flats Fight Wi-Fi
Three things stack up here that don't stack up the same way elsewhere in the city. Wall material — Leith tenements are solid Craigleith sandstone between flats, and the internal walls are often lath-and-plaster on the older ones or breeze block on the post-war ones, none of which are friendly to a 5 GHz signal. Layout — Leith Walk tenements in particular are long and narrow, so a router installed in the front room by the phone line has to reach the back bedroom through two solid internal walls. Density — the flats above, below and either side of you all have their own routers, and every one of them is competing for the same 2.4 GHz airtime.
The waterfront blocks add a different problem again: steel-reinforced concrete floors and acoustic plasterboard walls that are excellent at stopping noise between flats, and just as effective at stopping a Wi-Fi signal from reaching the far end of your own hallway.
Which Type of Leith Flat Do You Have?
The fix depends on the building, so start by placing yours in one of three groups.
Traditional tenement (Leith Walk, Easter Road, Bonnington, Great Junction Street). Long and narrow, stone external walls, older internal partitions, wooden floors. The main problem is distance combined with two or three internal walls between the router and the far bedroom. Channel congestion in the 2.4 GHz band is severe here — walk through the flat with a Wi-Fi analyser and you'll see fifteen or twenty neighbouring networks fighting for the same three usable channels.
Warehouse conversion (the Shore, Commercial Street, Bernard Street). Thick original industrial brick, high ceilings, sometimes exposed steel beams. The signal doesn't travel well through the brick, and the beams add reflection patterns that make coverage very uneven — full bars in one spot, nothing two metres away. Open-plan layouts help, but a router at one end of a long converted space rarely reaches the other.
Modern waterfront apartment (Ocean Terminal, Western Harbour, Newhaven). Steel-reinforced concrete, acoustic-rated internal walls, and often a service cupboard by the front door where the internet line terminates. That cupboard is usually the single worst place in the flat for a router — enclosed on all sides, buried inside the building envelope, and surrounded by soundproofing that also happens to be radio-proofing.
The One Fix That Solves Most Cases
Before anything is bought, move the router. Get it out of whatever cupboard or hallway corner it was left in by the previous tenant, and put it somewhere central, up off the floor, and out in the open. In a traditional tenement that means running a long Ethernet cable from the master socket in the front room down the hallway to a shelf near the middle of the flat. In a waterfront apartment it means relocating from the service cupboard to the living-room wall closest to the main rooms.
Flat Ethernet cable — the ribbon type, a few millimetres thick — tucks under skirting and door thresholds without needing to lift floorboards. A recent job on a Leith Walk railroad flat was solved with about twelve metres of it, running from the master socket in the sitting room, along the hallway skirting, into the back bedroom. The customer had been about to buy a mesh system; the whole thing was fixed with a single cable run. That's typical rather than lucky — choosing between powerline and mesh comes up on a lot of callouts, and the honest answer is often "neither, just move the router properly first."
Our networking and Wi-Fi work almost always starts with placement, and it's rare that placement plus one channel change on the 2.4 GHz band doesn't buy back most of the coverage.
When Mesh Is the Right Answer (and When It Isn't)
Mesh earns its keep when the flat is genuinely too long or too broken up by walls for one router in a good spot to reach everywhere. Long Leith Walk tenements with three or four rooms in a line, big warehouse conversions with dividing brick walls, and duplex waterfront flats with an upstairs mezzanine are all real mesh candidates. When you install one, use a wired backhaul between the nodes if you can — one Ethernet cable from the main router to the far node, even a temporary run along a skirting, will outperform any wireless mesh.
Where mesh doesn't help is when the main router is in a terrible spot. Adding a satellite node in the back bedroom of a tenement, when the main node is still stuck in the front-room cupboard against a stone wall, just extends a weak signal further. The satellite inherits the starting weakness and the whole network is disappointing.
Stacking Wi-Fi extenders and powerline adapters bought one at a time is the other trap. Every extender adds latency, every powerline adapter is at the mercy of the flat's wiring loop, and by the fourth device the network is slower and less reliable than the day it was one router. Two well-placed access points on a wired backbone beat a stack of range extenders every time. Something similar shows up on video-call callouts — the household has "good Wi-Fi" on paper but a chain of extenders that adds enough jitter to break Zoom.
How We Approach a Leith Callout
A typical Leith home callout starts with a signal survey — walking the flat with a tool that reads signal strength (dBm) and channel utilisation at every spot you actually use a device: the sofa, the desk, the kitchen island, the back bedroom. That gives us a map of where the signal genuinely drops and where it's fine, plus a picture of how congested the neighbouring networks are.
From that survey we usually recommend one of three things. Relocate the main router with an Ethernet cable and re-check — often enough on its own. Add one wired access point at the far end of the flat if the layout defeats a single router. Set up a proper mesh with wired backhaul if the property is big or awkward enough to need it. For the Leith cafés, bars and small offices we look after under business IT support, the same survey feeds into planning coverage across the whole trading floor, not just the till and the back office. When a fault first shows up on a home network, remote support is often enough to try a channel change and confirm whether a callout is actually needed.
Neighbourhood Notes
Leith and its neighbouring areas — Bonnington, Easter Road, Newhaven, Portobello along the coast, and Stockbridge and the New Town across town — all share the same tenement pattern to some degree, though the waterfront blocks are much more distinctive to Leith. If your Wi-Fi trouble follows you between a Leith flat and a rental elsewhere in the city, the diagnosis is usually the same: a router placed for convenience rather than coverage. See our companion piece on Wi-Fi dead spots at home for the underlying principles, which apply just as well here.
The Short Version
If your Wi-Fi in a Leith flat is patchy, don't start by buying anything. Work out which of the three building types you're in — traditional tenement, warehouse conversion, or waterfront apartment — and then move the router somewhere central, up off the floor, and out of any cupboard or service riser. Nine times out of ten that is the fix. The tenth time is when a proper survey and a mesh or access-point setup earns the callout.
Last updated: 5 July 2026