Wifi? Lofi? Nofi?
(Written: 06/12/2025, Updated: 04/09/2026)
Do you ever get that lonely feeling when your Wifi connects but the internet seems to be ignoring you? Well here's a technical example why that can be...
A customer phoned for help to restore wifi coverage to his garage.
Wifi is a short-range radio connection between your mobile devices and (usually) your router.
Internet data travels from your mobile device over your wifi connection to the router in your house and then down an external fibre or landline or coaxial or 4G or satellite or wide-area radio connection to your service provider, who then passes it onto the wider internet.
His broadband router was located in the attic to provide wifi coverage throughout the house but the signal wasn't reaching through the walls to his garage.
He had previously solved this problem with a network cable from the router through the wall and into the ceiling of the garage where he had mounted a secondary wifi access point.
This means that while a device is in the garage it will pass data over wifi to the access point in the ceiling. From there the data travels over the cable to the router in the attic and from there onwards to the internet, as before.
This was working well but had recently stopped.
He had bought a replacement TPLink TL-WA801N access point but this had not solved the problem.
He was located some distance away from us and wanted remote support so he could set it up himself.
We connected remotely to his Windows 11 laptop using remote desktop software. This allowed us to see the screen of his laptop and control his keyboard and mouse input over the internet.
Of course the laptop had to be in the house for this to happen because it requires an internet connection.
We broke the problem down into smaller steps.
We brought the new access point into the house and connected it to the router with a different, shorter network cable.
We found the access point MAC address written on the back of the device.
Using Windows Command Prompt we ran the command
ipconfig
and found that the local Default Gateway, DHCP server and DNS server all had the same local network address of 192.168.0.1.
These three services can all technically be provided by different machines on a network, but since a domestic broadband router usually provides all these services itself it's a good guess that the router management web page would be there also.
We logged in to the router management web page using the Microsoft Edge web browser on the laptop by typing the address 192.168.0.1 into the browser address bar and supplying the router admin password when asked.
Since the router keeps track of all the other devices on the network we then located the access point MAC address in the router's "Connected Devices" list.
This list also gave us the corresponding local IP address for the access point as 192.168.0.25. This address will have been given to the access point by the router when it first connected to the network. This IP address is what we need in order to talk directly to the access point itself over the network.
There are other ways to find the access point IP address, but getting it from the router is the most straightforward.
Using a new tab in Microsoft Edge we typed the address 192.168.0.25 and reached the TPLink access point login screen.
The access point was new and had not yet been configured so we set that up with the customer's password and wifi details.
Usually if you set an access point to the same wifi details as the router then your devices can switch automatically to whichever wifi signal is stronger.
In this case, however, the customer wanted separate wifi details for the new access point.
At this point we noted that 3 lights were lit on the access point front panel. Power, Wifi and Internet.
The customer connected his iPad to the new access point wifi and confirmed that he could connect through to the internet by performing a google search and visiting a website he'd never been to before.
Having proved the current arrangement worked we then moved the access point back to it's original location in the garage.
The access point then illuminated only 2 lights, Power and Wifi and no internet access was possible when the iPad was connected to the access point wifi.
At this point the access point also disappeared from the router "Connected Devices" list.
This suggested that the original cable from the router to the garage was faulty.
The customer did not have a cat5 network cable tester available so the easiest solution was for him to replace the cable.
The next day the customer phoned to say a new cable was installed and the access point was now working well in the garage.
Job done.
Do please get in touch if we can help you with anything similar.
All the best, from J.
(Written: 06/12/2025, Updated: 04/09/2026)
A customer phoned for help to restore wifi coverage to his garage.
Wifi is a short-range radio connection between your mobile devices and (usually) your router.
Internet data travels from your mobile device over your wifi connection to the router in your house and then down an external fibre or landline or coaxial or 4G or satellite or wide-area radio connection to your service provider, who then passes it onto the wider internet.
His broadband router was located in the attic to provide wifi coverage throughout the house but the signal wasn't reaching through the walls to his garage.
He had previously solved this problem with a network cable from the router through the wall and into the ceiling of the garage where he had mounted a secondary wifi access point.
This means that while a device is in the garage it will pass data over wifi to the access point in the ceiling. From there the data travels over the cable to the router in the attic and from there onwards to the internet, as before.
This was working well but had recently stopped.
He had bought a replacement TPLink TL-WA801N access point but this had not solved the problem.
He was located some distance away from us and wanted remote support so he could set it up himself.
We connected remotely to his Windows 11 laptop using remote desktop software. This allowed us to see the screen of his laptop and control his keyboard and mouse input over the internet.
Of course the laptop had to be in the house for this to happen because it requires an internet connection.
We broke the problem down into smaller steps.
We brought the new access point into the house and connected it to the router with a different, shorter network cable.
We found the access point MAC address written on the back of the device.
Using Windows Command Prompt we ran the command
ipconfig
and found that the local Default Gateway, DHCP server and DNS server all had the same local network address of 192.168.0.1.
These three services can all technically be provided by different machines on a network, but since a domestic broadband router usually provides all these services itself it's a good guess that the router management web page would be there also.
We logged in to the router management web page using the Microsoft Edge web browser on the laptop by typing the address 192.168.0.1 into the browser address bar and supplying the router admin password when asked.
Since the router keeps track of all the other devices on the network we then located the access point MAC address in the router's "Connected Devices" list.
This list also gave us the corresponding local IP address for the access point as 192.168.0.25. This address will have been given to the access point by the router when it first connected to the network. This IP address is what we need in order to talk directly to the access point itself over the network.
There are other ways to find the access point IP address, but getting it from the router is the most straightforward.
Using a new tab in Microsoft Edge we typed the address 192.168.0.25 and reached the TPLink access point login screen.
The access point was new and had not yet been configured so we set that up with the customer's password and wifi details.
Usually if you set an access point to the same wifi details as the router then your devices can switch automatically to whichever wifi signal is stronger.
In this case, however, the customer wanted separate wifi details for the new access point.
At this point we noted that 3 lights were lit on the access point front panel. Power, Wifi and Internet.
The customer connected his iPad to the new access point wifi and confirmed that he could connect through to the internet by performing a google search and visiting a website he'd never been to before.
Having proved the current arrangement worked we then moved the access point back to it's original location in the garage.
The access point then illuminated only 2 lights, Power and Wifi and no internet access was possible when the iPad was connected to the access point wifi.
At this point the access point also disappeared from the router "Connected Devices" list.
This suggested that the original cable from the router to the garage was faulty.
The customer did not have a cat5 network cable tester available so the easiest solution was for him to replace the cable.
The next day the customer phoned to say a new cable was installed and the access point was now working well in the garage.
Job done.
Do please get in touch if we can help you with anything similar.
All the best, from J.