BB lives in a house with solid brick internal walls
Same here, but we don't have any problems at all with signal strength over the other side of the house and on a different floor (Netgear modem/router). We live in the middle of nowhere with only one other house nearby, so maybe we don't get any interference which probably helps.
In fact we can also get "good" signal strength from our next door neighbour's Sky box, so Sky might also be worth looking at!