Almost every Wi-Fi callout we take on in Stockbridge starts with the same sentence — "the internet is fine in the front room but nothing works in the bedroom." That is not, in nine out of ten cases, a broken router or a bad line from the ISP. It is the fabric of the building. Stockbridge is a beautiful patchwork of Georgian and Victorian tenement flats, and the same solid stone construction that keeps the flats warm in winter and quiet from the street is exactly what strangles a modern Wi-Fi signal.
This guide is written for that specific problem — a good broadband deal, a decent-looking router, and a phone that drops to a single bar the moment you walk out of the room the router is in. If you want us to just come and look at the flat, our networking and Wi-Fi service covers Stockbridge, Comely Bank, Canonmills and Inverleith on a callout basis.
Why Stockbridge Flats Are Notoriously Bad for Wi-Fi
Two things about a classic Stockbridge tenement fight your router. The first is the walls. External and party walls in these buildings are commonly two feet of solid sandstone rubble; internal walls between rooms are often plaster-on-lath over a solid stone or brick core. The second is the layout — most flats are arranged as a long central hallway with rooms leading off each side. Signal has to travel down that hallway and then punch through a wall at right angles to reach the far room, and 5 GHz Wi-Fi in particular hates that combination.
On the bench we regularly measure a 40–50 decibel drop between the router room and the room directly next door in a Stockbridge tenement, versus 15–25 dB in a modern breeze-block flat of the same footprint. That is not a small difference. That is the difference between "connected but slow" and "no signal at all."
The Colonies: a Vertical Problem, Not a Horizontal One
Everything above assumes the flat is laid out sideways, with the dead spot in a room along the hall. The Colonies — the terraces off Glenogle Road, Reid Terrace, Hugh Miller Place, Collins Place and the rest — break that assumption completely. Each building is two separate flats stacked on top of each other, the upper one reached by its own external stair, and the internal layout is narrow and deep rather than wide.
That changes the geometry of the problem. In an upper Colony flat the router is usually near the stair door at one end, and the signal has to travel the full length of a narrow flat rather than radiating outwards. In a lower one it often has to go up through the floor to reach a bedroom or a converted attic space, and that floor is joists, lath and plaster, and very often a later layer of sound deadening or insulation added between the two flats. A ceiling like that attenuates far harder than an internal stud wall, which is why mesh placement that works fine in a tenement fails here.
The practical answer in a Colony flat is to think along the length rather than in a circle: get the router as close to the middle of the flat as the wiring allows, mount it high, and if a second floor is involved, accept early that a wireless satellite sitting directly below a solid floor will struggle. A short Ethernet run to the far end almost always beats another node. The same logic applies to any upper-and-lower conversion, and we see the identical pattern in Leith tenement flats where the dead spot is in a converted attic rather than along a hall.
The Retrofit That Kills Your Signal
There is one modern addition to an old flat that causes more dead spots than any amount of sandstone, and almost nobody suspects it: foil-backed insulated plasterboard. When a Stockbridge flat has had its external walls dry-lined for warmth — increasingly common, and often done during a kitchen or bathroom refit — the board that goes on is frequently rigid insulation with an aluminium facing. That foil is a continuous conductive layer, and it reflects 2.4 and 5 GHz far more effectively than the stone behind it ever did.
The symptom is distinctive. One room, usually the most recently renovated, is dramatically worse than rooms further from the router. Signal drops off sharply the moment you step through the doorway rather than fading gradually across the flat. If the wall was fine two years ago and is hopeless now, look at what was done to it, not at the router.
Two related culprits are worth checking at the same time. Foil-backed underlay beneath new flooring does the same job horizontally, which matters in an upper flat trying to reach downstairs. And where old plaster has been repaired, expanded metal lath is sometimes used as a backing — a fine steel mesh that is, for radio purposes, a screen. None of these can be undone sensibly, which is exactly why a wired backhaul earns its keep in a renovated flat: run the cable and stop fighting the building.
Test the Signal Properly Before You Move Anything
Before you buy a mesh kit or rearrange the study, spend ten minutes measuring what you have. Install a scanning app like Wi-Fi Analyzer (Windows or Android) or AirPort Utility with Wi-Fi Scan enabled (iPhone). Walk to every room, wait five seconds, and write down the signal strength (RSSI) and the channel. You want two numbers per room — 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz separately.
Anything above -60 dBm is fine. -60 to -70 is workable but streams will stutter. -70 to -80 is where video calls fall apart. Below -80 is a dead spot. Do the same in the same rooms at 8pm on a weekday. Stockbridge tenement blocks share airspace vertically as well as horizontally, and the neighbour above you streaming Netflix on the same channel as your router can turn a workable connection into a dead one after dinner. Our why your Wi-Fi slows down every evening post covers the airtime-competition side of that in more detail.
Router Placement Wins That Cost You Nothing
The default install in Stockbridge is the router sitting on the floor next to the ISP's master socket in the hallway or a corner of the living room, usually with a stack of books next to it. That is the worst possible placement. Wi-Fi signal broadly radiates outwards and downwards from the antennas, so a router on the floor loses half the signal into the flat below.
Before spending on new kit, try these in order:
- Lift the router at least a metre off the floor — on a shelf, not inside a cabinet.
- Move it out from a corner if you can — corners lose signal into two external walls at once.
- Keep it clear of the microwave, the cordless phone base, and the TV. All three are 2.4 GHz noise sources.
- If your ISP master socket is fixed in a bad spot, consider a longer Ethernet cable to reposition the router — a five-metre flat Cat6 down the skirting board is nearly invisible and often the single biggest fix.
We had a job on Cheyne Street where the router lived in a lovely built-in cupboard under the stairs. Simply pulling it out onto a shelf in the same cupboard, with the door left ajar, added 12 dBm to the signal in the back bedroom. That was a fifteen-minute fix, no shopping required.
When 2.4 GHz Beats 5 GHz — Yes, Really
Every article you read tells you to use the 5 GHz band because it is faster. In a modern flat that is correct. In a Stockbridge tenement it is often wrong. 5 GHz gives you higher headline speeds in the same room as the router, but it barely penetrates a solid stone wall. 2.4 GHz travels much better through masonry, with lower peak speed and more interference from neighbours as the trade-off.
Most modern routers broadcast both bands under the same network name and let the phone pick. That decision routinely goes wrong in these buildings — the phone latches on to 5 GHz in the front room and then stubbornly refuses to switch to 2.4 GHz when you walk into the back bedroom. If you have a router that lets you split the two bands into two separate SSIDs (for example "MyWifi-5G" and "MyWifi-2G"), do it, and manually join the 2.4 GHz network from devices that live in the far rooms.
Where Mesh Actually Helps — and Where It Doesn't
Once router placement is optimised and the band split is done, if the far bedroom is still a dead spot, mesh is usually the right answer for a Stockbridge flat. Two decent nodes — one in the living room, one halfway down the hallway — will cover almost every classic tenement. Three nodes is overkill for a two-bed and rarely helps a three-bed unless the flat has a genuine dogleg.
If mesh is where you end up, you can see the systems we sell in the networking section of our shop.
The catch is the backhaul. The two mesh nodes have to talk to each other, and if you drop the satellite in the room with the worst signal it will inherit that same weakness. Place the satellite roughly halfway between the main node and the dead spot, not in the dead spot itself. Our step-by-step mesh Wi-Fi setup guide walks through the ordering and configuration once you have the kit in hand.
Powerline: a Niche Fix, Not a Miracle
Powerline adapters push a network signal over the mains wiring. On paper that is perfect for a stone-walled flat — the signal skips the walls entirely. In practice, whether powerline is any good depends entirely on the age and condition of the flat's wiring. Modern rewired Stockbridge tenements often do well with powerline. Older un-rewired flats, particularly those with a shared consumer unit across the stairwell, tend to see poor throughput and random dropouts. For a full head-to-head on the two options, our powerline vs mesh Wi-Fi comparison covers the trade-offs.
The honest position is that mesh is the safer choice for a Stockbridge tenement in 2026. Powerline is worth trying only if the flat has been rewired in the last twenty years and you already own a pair of adapters.
When to Call in a Survey
If you have tried the placement fixes, split the bands, and the signal in the back room is still hopeless, an in-person survey is worth doing before you spend on hardware. We bring a proper signal meter, measure every room on both bands, check for channel clashes with the neighbours, and tell you exactly which mesh (or wired) option will fix your specific flat — including the ones where the answer turns out to be a single well-placed Ethernet run rather than any new Wi-Fi kit at all.
For a same-day visit inside Stockbridge, book through our Stockbridge same-day computer repair page or via the general home and office callouts service. If the issue is purely router configuration and you would rather not have anyone in the flat, our remote support team can log in, split the SSIDs, and reconfigure the mesh in about half an hour.
Last updated: 23 September 2026