1Gbps FTTH - how to network it best?

spudbynight

spudbynight

spudbynight

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Ireland/Northern Ireland Border
I've just bought a new home and FTTH is available. I've ordered this and am trying to work out my options for sharing this connection around the house.

The house is about 140m3 and was built around 15 years ago. I'd like a solid WiFi signal throughout. One other thing is I need a rock solid connection for my main PC. I play EVE online which unfortunately doesn't deal well with any breaks in connectivity. I did previously try and connect my PC with 802.11ac to a Vodafone router 2m away. EVE would drop its connection sporadically despite everything else continuing without any noticeable interupption.

I know that running network cables through the house is the ideal thing but that would cause a lot of disruption. How reliable is a Mesh setup going to be for me? Would a better router enable me to connect reliably without any of those micro-drops?

If I am going to setup some sort of improved WiFi setup, what should I look at? Should I spend the extra money on WiFi 6E?
 
Yeah cabling is your absolute best bet. If your house is built anything like mine then you might well be able to get a cable down inside the wall cavities with some fish tape. A wireless mesh could introduce even more problems with latency and dropouts. A decent Wifi AP should cover the house fine. I have a Unifi 6 LR mounted to the ceiling on the landing and it covers the house with ease.
 
ChrisD. said:
Spend some money on cabling up the house, then mount a decent Wireless Access Point centrally and hardwire your PC.
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How much would this kind of thing cost to get someone to do out of interest? Assuming that it can be done within wall cavities without hacking the whole house up..!
 
You'd have to get a local installer to quote but typically around £1k from memory for a 4 bed house, maybe more depending on the difficulty. It all depends what you want, you can put cabling in the corner and put it in trunking, nearly invisible unless you are looking directly at it. I have a run from the middle of downstairs to the upstairs landing (plus a spare cable in the loft for future expansion) plus another cable going to my downstairs office. It probably cost me around £50 or so for all the equipment (cable, heads, krone tool, trunking etc) and took me 2-3 hours in total. I get Wifi everywhere in the house and full 10 Gbps networking to my office and back to the NAS (which is where the internet comes in).
 
I'm in Ireland now and getting tradesman is more difficult. Thanks for the suggestions, I'm going to see how easily I can get things done
 
Cabling is the way forward for reliability but a decent wifi mesh setup should also sort you out, loads of options but if you were having problems with wifi 2m away with no major walls that might suggest you have a hardware problem, there should be no drops unless you absolutely saturated the wifi natwork.

If you do have major walls wifi 6e won't help you, 6Ghz penetrates even worse than 5Ghz. If you go for wifi get something with a dedicated wifi channel for backhaul so your main wifi channel doesn't get swamped with intramesh wifi comms knocking speed down, Also if you have 1Gb now you'll probably want to get something with a least 2.5G port so that you are ready for future upgrades?

I use a cheap wifi mesh with no dedicated backhaul channels and its completely reliable, zero drops and no latency impact, I can also get 1Gb between wired devices on the satellites communicating through floors wirelessly but if I am using wifi devices on a wifi mesh connected satellite I sees a significant drop off in bandwidth, latency is still good just bandwidth drops as I only have 2 wifi bands rather than 3.
 
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I was in a similar situation with a 15 year old house and poor wifi in some parts, mostly where I have my home office set-up. Something had to been done at the start of the pandemic, as zoom calls would drop out randomly.

I bought all the cable, connectors and faceplates etc myself, and then just got a local company in to run the actual cables without cutting holes in the walls other than for the new faceplates. A couple of the rooms had a TV ariel point, and they just pulled the cables up taped to the coax, then pulled the coax back down. I had everything terminated in the loft where there is power and light. With all the other rooms, they were able to poke a flexible rod up/down through the internal walls and then pull the cables through. With one room, they couldn't get the rod past a horizontal batten, so switch the mains off, and pulled up the Cat6a cables attached to the twin and earth, before pulling them back down and switching on the power again. In all, it took two of them a day to do everything including all the termination and testing and it cost about £350 in labour, and about £200 in materials.

Everything that can be wired is now wired, so only phones and tablets use wireless and I've not had any problems with speed or latency on any device since. I just have a single Asus router handling all the wifi, as it seems to be up to the job now that mostly everything else is wired. I might look at getting an access point fitted closer to summer next year so I can get a better wifi signal in the back garden.
 
Getting a full 1gig throughout the house is going to be quite hard. I would focus on where you need the full speed - and where could happily still work with less.

A Mesh will get you the same wifi throughout your house with seamless switching between nodes. However to get the full speed, you'd need to connect them all via ethernet.

Wifi6E would give you the best speed - although 6ghz is likely to have less range than 2.4 or 5ghz. You'd have to read up how each Mesh utilizes the frequencies to create a backhaul if you're not using a cable between them. If it's 5ghz (most likely to be compatible with other routers of the same family) then you'll see quite a bit of speed drop off.
 
Mesh is fine for casual use but the right thing to do, as already advised, is to cable as much as you can and a really smart move with fibre to the home. Think of it as an investment as it is a plus point when selling a house these days if you're all properly cabled up. And if you're cabled up then mesh becomes a bit less relevant. The nice thing you'd get from mesh that would still be of use if they're cabled is the centralised management interface and the seamless roaming without hassle. But because you'd have the cables it also opens up the possibility of straight forward access points which will do the same if you go for the the prosumer variants.
 
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