Big farmhouse, how to get good wifi coverage throughout it all?

[raymanh]

The place is about 45m x 10m and it's very old so some solid walls and a big stone staircase. Upstairs floor/ceiling is quite thin however. At the moment there is just one wifi router at one end. Just an ISP provided one so not great. It serves around 25% of the house. The house can get crowded sometimes with about 10-15 people.

I'm not sure what to do:

Option 1: Mesh system seems attractive as if it works well it'll be simple to set up and won't require ethernet connections. Otherwise I'm worried given the solid walls I may need quite a lot of nodes, maybe 5 spaced evenly along the length of the house but alternating downstairs/upstairs. Also they might not be fast enough when the house fills up and might have to run ethernet cables to them anyway.

Option 2: A couple of access points and an upgraded router. I assume these have better range than mesh nodes so just two in addition to the router might be sufficient. Just not sure on how to configure them? ISP -> Modem -> New wifi router ->-> APs. Saw some people mentioning putting a "controller" or something in there but not sure what that does. Does it make roaming more seamless? If so then isn't just using the same SSID without a controller good enough? I've never done anything 'networky' so this option scares me somewhat.

What are your thoughts?

Thanks

 

[Caged]

Give up on your hopes of wireless mesh, you need wired backhaul

 

[raymanh]

Give up on your hopes of wireless mesh, you need wired backhaul

So your vote is mesh with wired backhaul? Do you have any specific model recommendations or features to get like triband?

 

[Glanza]

Get some Aruba access points that are cabled to a POE switch.