Best Solution for extending Wi-Fi throughout house with brick walls?

strocky

strocky

strocky

Associate
Joined
9 Jul 2007
Posts
398
Layout
2 Story House (front 4 rooms brick wall 1950's)
Back 4 rooms (modern plasterboard extension)
Mancave (mix of old brick with modern plasterboard inside)

Current Kit
Three 5G Router (currently situated in front of house(
TP Link 1300 AV / TL-PA8010P Extenders (3 off in total - One for each bedroom)
Ubiquiti UAP-AC-LR Access Point (was used to boost wifi from house into mancave)
15 Metres Outdoor Lan cable (running from front of house over roof into mancave at rear garden)
Multiple 1Gigabit Switches + 1 off 2.5Gb switch

Main Clients
3 off - Wifi Tablets (all around house)
4 off - Wifi Phones (all around house)
2 off - Nvidia Shields (pref wired) (one in mancave / one in back bedroom)
1 off - HTPC Server (deffo wired and in mancave)

Coverage required approx 160 Square Meters, would like at least ethernet access in one of the bedrooms

As you can see the above is a hot-potch fix and not terribly reliable, it's also been made semi-redundant because I had access to 2 No. Three 5G Routers so ran one in the mancave wired and one in the house to serve the bedrooms via wifi

However the 2nd 5G router is away at the end of the month so I either need to get the old band back together or open to suggestions for a more cohesive solution
 
If you want a fully reliable option, you will want to wire up each room that struggles to get a signal, then place an access point there. Seeing as you already have a Unifi one, I would be tempted to stick with that so you can manage them all with the Unifi controller.
 
you need to run ethernet wires. Wifi signal becomes uselss after 3 partition wall or 2 brick walls. Think of wireless as the connection between your wireless device and the network, not the connection from your firewall/router to your device. i.e. wifi is 'last few metre' in the room/hall to your device, and you need wired infrastructure to get your network to that point. Use unifi, set up PoE and then you only have to run ethernet . this is the way.
 
Same here. Property is all brick and stone walls, no partition or stud walls. I went from Powerline Adapters, to Mesh, and now finally on wired ceiling mounted PoE APs. Network side is all 2.5Gb with Cat6a. Only way to do it sadly as mentioned above.
 
strocky said:
15 Metres Outdoor Lan cable (running from front of house over roof into mancave at rear garden)
Click to expand...
Just on this, I use an outdoor AP connected via smart mesh back to an upstream AP indoors. Similar distance to your man cave. Backhauls on either 2.4Ghz or 5Ghz and presents the other channel for use. I ran some speed tests and it is more than acceptable for what I need outside. So you might not have to run a cable to your man cave.
 
Powerline is fine if you are happy with probably max 20-25 MB. Physical ethernet obviously the best but probably the most effort unless you did what I did and had some electricians do it externally (3 storey house), they then just drilled into each floor, then on each floor there is a mesh point.
 
I've a 1930s house with internal brick walls and after spending a year trying various routers, powerline, mesh, extenders I gave up getting a clean signal to stream TV etc without hiccups. I spent last week with a big drill and many metres of CAT5e and now every static device is cabled.
Not had a problem since. It is worth the effort.
 
You can make extenders/mesh work in buildings with 50cm thick stone walls if you set them up so that there’s only ever one wooden floor/ceiling between them.

Running Cat6 and installing APs is always going to give you more throughput with less delay and jitter.
 
strocky said:
Layout
2 Story House (front 4 rooms brick wall 1950's)
Back 4 rooms (modern plasterboard extension)
Mancave (mix of old brick with modern plasterboard inside)

Current Kit
Three 5G Router (currently situated in front of house(
TP Link 1300 AV / TL-PA8010P Extenders (3 off in total - One for each bedroom)
Ubiquiti UAP-AC-LR Access Point (was used to boost wifi from house into mancave)
15 Metres Outdoor Lan cable (running from front of house over roof into mancave at rear garden)
Multiple 1Gigabit Switches + 1 off 2.5Gb switch

Main Clients
3 off - Wifi Tablets (all around house)
4 off - Wifi Phones (all around house)
2 off - Nvidia Shields (pref wired) (one in mancave / one in back bedroom)
1 off - HTPC Server (deffo wired and in mancave)

Coverage required approx 160 Square Meters, would like at least ethernet access in one of the bedrooms

As you can see the above is a hot-potch fix and not terribly reliable, it's also been made semi-redundant because I had access to 2 No. Three 5G Routers so ran one in the mancave wired and one in the house to serve the bedrooms via wifi

However the 2nd 5G router is away at the end of the month so I either need to get the old band back together or open to suggestions for a more cohesive solution
Click to expand...

Wifi doesn't like bricks; the good solution is to lay Ethernet to each part of the house including each room and connect the Ethernet to an access point. If you have easy access under the house then laying wire to the whole house should be easy and very tidy. Alternatively you can lay the Ethernet through the ceiling


One other option that could work and I've seen it work before - if your ceiling is thin plaster board then you could install several wifi access points inside the ceiling, place one AP right above each room and then you should have strong wifi everywhere as the APs talk to eachother through the open cavity of the ceiling and then the signal goes down through the plaster into the room and never needs to pass through any walls. This solution is very clean because there won't be any exposed wires nor will you have ugly AP boxes all over the house - however it's only possible in a single story house
 
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Re the Unifi AP, would this pass muster on a more budget conscious basis which you can pick up for £25 a unit from a well know high street store

Google WiFi Whole Home System 2016​


I would assume the main issue with the above would be powering them up with an adaptor vs PoE on the Unifi?
 
Grim5 said:
Wifi doesn't like bricks; the good solution is to lay Ethernet to each part of the house including each room and connect the Ethernet to an access point. If you have easy access under the house then laying wire to the whole house should be easy and very tidy. Alternatively you can lay the Ethernet through the ceiling


One other option that could work and I've seen it work before - if your ceiling is thin plaster board then you could install several wifi access points inside the ceiling, place one AP right above each room and then you should have strong wifi everywhere as the APs talk to eachother through the open cavity of the ceiling and then the signal goes down through the plaster into the room and never needs to pass through any walls. This solution is very clean because there won't be any exposed wires nor will you have ugly AP boxes all over the house - however it's only possible in a single story house
Click to expand...
That sounds a good wee hack, unfortunately I'm in a 2 story
 
strocky said:
That sounds a good wee hack, unfortunately I'm in a 2 story
Click to expand...

I do major renovations to my homes and for the last two I've put several access points in the loft above each section of house that is bounded by brick/block walls. As both of these houses had two story extensions I also had the thick wall issue between rooms but doing this worked fine on both floor levels below (and for me kept the APs out of the way of work such as me re-skimming ceilings).

Once renovated I did move the APs to the ceiling below where they were in the loft before and this gave a very slightly better signal on the ground floor but was mainly to put them in a better environment. I've never bothered with non wired APs as its just never going to be as good.
 
strocky said:
Re the Unifi AP, would this pass muster on a more budget conscious basis which you can pick up for £25 a unit from a well know high street store

Google WiFi Whole Home System 2016​


I would assume the main issue with the above would be powering them up with an adaptor vs PoE on the Unifi?
Click to expand...
I wouldn't bother with these, they're very limited in terms of WiFi settings (eg can't manually set your own WiFi channels, it picks what it thinks is "best"). Not to mention the 2016 version is only up to WiFi 5. If you have full fibre internet you definitely want WiFi 6 minimum, I see ~900mb odd on most of my phones/laptops that supports WiFi 6 on the 5GHz band, but even then these APs are wired up to the main router via ethernet instead of mesh.
 
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