Nine calls out of ten that start with “my Wi-Fi is slow, I’ve already bought a new router” come from someone living in a tenement. Very often that tenement is in Leith. When we open a scanner on the doorstep of a stair off Leith Walk or a converted warehouse flat down at The Shore, the reason is usually not the router the customer just paid for — it’s that twenty-something other routers are all shouting on the same three channels of 2.4GHz spectrum from the flats above, below and on either side.
If you’re somewhere in EH6 and the connection crawls to a stop every evening, this is almost certainly what’s happening. Below is what we actually check, what we recommend, and where a new box is genuinely worth buying. If you want us to come out and sort it in person, our networking & Wi-Fi service covers the whole of Edinburgh.
Why Leith Tenements Are Different
Two things about the Leith building stock make it a special case. First, tenement walls in the older stairs are solid stone or brick, sometimes 500mm thick, with almost no insulation cavities to hide cabling in — the perfect medium for absorbing radio signal. Second, the flats are stacked at very high density — six to eight households per stair, sometimes two stairs deep off a single close — and every household has at least one router, most of them factory-set to broadcast on 2.4GHz channels 1, 6 or 11.
When we run a scan on a Leith Walk landing, we routinely see 30 to 50 different SSIDs on 2.4GHz. In a comparable scan up in Corstorphine or out in Portobello we’d see somewhere between 8 and 15. That’s not a router problem. That’s a spectrum problem, and no consumer router made can fix it on its own.
The Evening Spike Everyone Notices
Almost every Leith Wi-Fi call we take mentions the same detail: it’s fine during the day, and dies between about seven and eleven at night. That’s not a router that gets tired. That’s the entire stair getting home from work, plugging in Chromecasts, starting Netflix, video-calling family and firing up consoles — all on the same overlapping 2.4GHz channels at the same time. Your router is technically working perfectly; it just can’t get a word in edgeways.
If you already have a router less than three or four years old, this is the bit we’d ask you to look at before you buy anything new.
The Real Fix: Get Off 2.4GHz Wherever You Can
The 5GHz band has far more usable channels (in the UK, up to 19 non-overlapping channels versus effectively 3 on 2.4GHz), and because 5GHz doesn’t travel through walls as well, your neighbour’s router two flats down probably isn’t reaching you on it at all — which is exactly what you want. In practice this means:
- Split the SSIDs. Most routers by default publish one Wi-Fi name that quietly steers devices between bands. In a congested tenement that steering often gets it wrong, and phones end up glued to a jammed 2.4GHz signal. In your router settings, give the 5GHz radio its own separate name (e.g. MyWiFi-5G) and connect anything modern — phones, laptops, TVs, the console — to that one explicitly. Keep the 2.4GHz name for the printer, the smart plug and the doorbell, which need range more than speed.
- Wire what you can. A single Cat6 patch cable from the router to the TV or PC removes that device from the fight entirely. On a tenement job we can usually run a discreet flat cable along the skirting to reach the TV corner without drilling — that alone often solves “buffering during the football” permanently.
- Use a proper channel scan before touching anything else. A simple phone app like WiFiman or Wi-Fi Analyzer will show which 2.4GHz channel is least busy at your address; usually it’s not the one the router auto-picked. Manually setting the channel is a two-minute change that sometimes doubles evening throughput.
When Mesh Actually Helps — and When It Doesn’t
Mesh systems get sold as the fix for everything, but in a stone-walled tenement they’re only worth installing if your flat has more than one distinct room the signal has to reach, and the walls between those rooms are the internal lath-and-plaster type rather than external stone. A three-node mesh spread across a long “shotgun” Leith flat — hall, living room, back bedroom — genuinely transforms it. A single-node mesh in a compact one-bed, or a mesh trying to punch through the 500mm stone external wall to reach a boxroom, is effort spent for very little gain.
If you’re weighing this up, our detailed comparison of powerline vs mesh Wi-Fi covers when each one is actually the right call, and our mesh Wi-Fi setup guide walks through the install itself.
A Recent Job on The Shore
A customer in a converted warehouse flat near The Shore had paid for a full 900Mbps fibre package and was seeing 40Mbps at the sofa in the evening. New router, hadn’t helped. When we ran a scan we counted 41 other SSIDs visible from the living room, 37 of them on 2.4GHz, most clustered on channel 6. The router had been auto-band-steering everything onto that channel because 5GHz was “weaker” from where the router was sitting on the hall shelf.
Fix: gave the two bands separate names, moved the phones and the TV onto the 5GHz name manually, and ran a 6m flat Cat6 along the skirting from the hall router to the TV corner. Evening speed at the TV: 780Mbps wired. Evening speed on the phone at the sofa: 220Mbps on 5GHz, instead of 40. No new hardware bought. That is a typical Leith outcome.
What to Check Yourself Before You Call Anyone
- Restart the router properly — power off at the wall for two minutes, not a five-second cycle.
- Update the router firmware (it’s usually under “Administration” or “System”). A lot of Wi-Fi bugs are fixed silently in firmware.
- Move the router. If it’s in the hall cupboard behind the fuse box, that alone can swallow half your signal. Central and out in the open is the rule.
- Run a speed test wired directly into the router with an ethernet cable. If wired is fast and Wi-Fi is slow, it’s definitely the Wi-Fi side — not your provider.
- Try your phone on 5GHz specifically (turn off Wi-Fi, forget the network, then reconnect and pick the 5GHz name if you’ve split them).
When It’s Worth Getting Us Out
If you’ve done the checks above and it’s still crawling, an on-site visit lets us do a proper site survey with a real spectrum tool, run cabling where it makes sense, and configure the router the way it should have been out of the box. We do this across Leith, Newington, Portobello and the rest of Edinburgh under home and office callouts, and if you need us the same day the Leith same-day repair service covers urgent calls when working-from-home has ground to a halt. For businesses running a small office in one of the Shore or Leith Walk conversions, a proper managed setup usually falls under business IT support, and light ongoing tuning can be handled by remote support.
A slow tenement Wi-Fi is almost never one problem. It’s a router in the wrong place, on the wrong channel, doing the wrong band-steering, in a stair full of neighbours doing the same thing. Fix any two of those and the connection you’re already paying for suddenly starts behaving like the one on the tin. If you want a comparable read for a different building type, our post on Wi-Fi dead spots in Stockbridge flats and the one on Marchmont’s evening Wi-Fi slowdown cover the two other classic Edinburgh cases.
Last updated: 9 August 2026