Networking Support8 September 20265 min read

Wi-Fi Dropping Out On Calls? It Is Rarely The Broadband

Wi-Fi that fails mid-call but tests fine afterwards is usually a fault between your device and the router, not on the broadband line itself.

Why the line tests fine and the call still drops

The classic home-office complaint is that video calls freeze or drop while everything else seems fine, and a speed test five minutes later comes back perfect. That pattern points away from the broadband line and towards the Wi-Fi hop at the end of it. In a London flat or a terraced house you are usually sharing the airwaves with dozens of neighbouring networks, and a device that is clinging to a congested channel, or to a weak 5GHz signal it should have handed back, will stutter exactly when the connection is under load.

Intermittent faults are the ones that go unfixed for months, because every test run after the event passes. In the meantime the calls that matter are the ones that break. It is also the fault most often misdiagnosed as a slow line, which leads to paying for a faster package that changes nothing, because the bottleneck was never the line.

Need help right now? Our Networking Support engineers can come directly to your home or office anywhere in Greater London to diagnose and fix this for you.

Work out whether it drops on one device or on all of them at once. One device is that device or its position; all of them points at the router.
Notice whether it fails under load — calls, video, large uploads — or at random moments with nothing running.
Plug a laptop into the router with an ethernet cable for a day. If that connection never drops, the line is fine and the Wi-Fi is not.
Look at where the router actually is. In a cupboard, behind a television, on the floor or next to a microwave are all common and all bad.

How we find where the connection is actually breaking

The point of the visit is to catch the fault happening rather than to test the network once it has settled down, which is why we measure in the rooms you actually work in.

Survey the 2.4GHz and 5GHz channels in your rooms to see what your neighbours are sitting on and where there is clear air.
Check whether devices are being steered between bands properly, or holding onto a weak signal instead of switching.
Test at the master socket to separate a genuine line fault from a Wi-Fi one before anything is replaced.
Judge whether the layout needs a mesh node or wired backhaul rather than a plug-in repeater, which often halves throughput.

Keeping a home network stable

Most home networks are one or two placement decisions away from being reliable, and none of these cost anything.

Give the router open air, roughly central to where you work, and off the floor.
If devices keep picking the wrong band, give the two bands separate names so you can choose deliberately.
Treat an ISP router more than about five years old as a suspect in its own right.