Full Wi-Fi bars, so why is nothing loading?

Dan has it all set up. Popcorn. Blanket. Movie. He presses play, and the little circle starts spinning. And spinning.

“I have full Wi-Fi bars!” he says, holding up the laptop like evidence in court.

Liz has bad news for the bars.

What the bars actually measure

Those bars only measure one short trip: from your laptop (or phone) to your router, the little box with the blinking lights. In Dan's case, that trip is across his living room.

Full bars mean the laptop can hear the router loud and clear. That's all they mean. They don't know whether the router can reach anything beyond your front door.

Apple's iPhones even admit this in writing. Sometimes, under the name of the Wi-Fi network you're connected to, they say “No Internet Connection”. Connected to Wi-Fi, but not to the internet. Both can be true at once.

The movie's long trip

Your movie doesn't start in your router. It starts far away, on a computer in a data center, a building full of computers that store and send things like movies. From there it crosses the internet, comes down a cable to your home, goes into the box, and only then makes the short Wi-Fi hop to your laptop.

Wi-Fi is just the last few steps of that trip. Full bars don't mean the whole trip works.

Dan put it best: “So, a perfect driveway onto a closed road?”

Maybe. The only way to know is to find out where the road is closed.

Finding the broken step

Liz's first test takes ten seconds. Can your phone load anything on the same Wi-Fi? Make sure the phone is really using the Wi-Fi, not mobile data, then try opening a website.

• If the phone works, your home internet is fine. The problem is the movie app or the movie service. Try closing and reopening the app, or check whether the service is having trouble.
• If nothing loads anywhere, then it's the box, or the road beyond it.

In Dan's case, nothing loaded. Not even his email. So the next step is the oldest trick in tech support, and it's in every internet company's help pages: unplug the box for about thirty seconds, then plug it back in. Then give it a few minutes to come back. That's a restart, by the way: just unplugging and plugging back in. Leave any tiny “reset” button alone; that's a different thing.

Still stuck? Then the problem may not be in your home at all. Your internet company might be having an outage. Check its outage page or app, using your phone's mobile data, since your home internet is the thing that isn't working.

For Dan, the restart did it. The movie played. The popcorn, sadly, was cold. Liz can fix a lot of things, but not that.

What the video left out

Modem or router? Technically, two jobs happen in that box. The modem connects your home to the internet company's cable, and the router makes the Wi-Fi and shares the connection around your home. Many homes have a single box that does both; some have two. When the video says “the box”, it means whichever box (or boxes) you have. If you have two, unplug both.

Sometimes it really is the Wi-Fi. The point isn't that Wi-Fi is never the problem. With weak bars, or a laptop two floors away from the router, the last few steps can be the broken ones. The point is that full bars don't prove the rest of the trip is working.

Why does unplugging it help? That's a whole other story, with its own video: why turning it off and on again actually works.

So full bars just mean your laptop can hear the router. Wi-Fi connects you to your router. The internet is what your router connects to.

What you can do

• Test with a second device on the same Wi-Fi. If it works, look at the app or service, not your internet.
• If nothing loads on any device, unplug your modem and router for about 30 seconds, then plug them back in and wait a few minutes.
• Still nothing? Check your internet company's outage page or app on mobile data.
• Save your internet company's support number in your phone now, before you need it.