One of the main issues in home environments is location of the router. Most probably service providers bring the connection inside the house from the street to the first accessible room. Due to the characteristics of the RF placement of WiFi device in one corner of the room does not help.

Imagine a light bulb in a room with glass walls, you can see light coming out of the room and if now you replace the walls with concrete walls you will not able to see any light coming out of the room. While signals passes through different walls, signal strength attenuates and further you are from your Wireless modem, weaker signal strength will affect performance of Wireless connectivity.

Location:

Ideally wireless Modem should be placed in the middle of area with desired coverage. It could be in the room or it could be suitable area within the house which covers most of the house. Its also important to understand that which area in the house is more important then other. Lets suppose you play video while you are cooking and only check Emails from bed room then better location of the Modem would be closer to kitchen because you need better connection and better data rates in the kitchen.

Recommendations: 

• As we discussed above place the router in a central location of your desired coverage area
• Avoid area with metal objects
• Do not place modem under the bed or sofa
• Do not place the modem near microwave because microwave leak RF energy which interferes with 2.4GHz frquency band
• Better to avoid kitchen area because it has metallic objects and microwave
• Concrete walls reduce the signals significantly so try to place router in area which is open and signals can travel further
• Position the modem according to service provider recommendations (mostly upwards)

Note:

Service providers do recommend to use boosters and mesh nodes to extend range in the house but these solution does not provide good user experience. I would recommend to use Enterprise Wireless access points which can be wired back to the modem and can be installed in the middle of the house. Enterprise access points provides much better user experience as compare to different cheap boosters.

Enterprise access points are not cheap and need some expertise to install and configure. Different wireless vendors can be used are Ruckus unleashed, Meraki, Cisco and aerohive etc. Some of these access points can also be found on Ebay on cheaper price.

Please make sure you know how to used these devices before purchasing any of enterprise access points.