tl;dr: stick an AP in your loft.

I have lived in three fairly different houses through my adult life: a very small 1930s terrace, a 2018 new built semi and a larger 1970s detached property.

In all of these I had the same problem. Placing a Wi-Fi router at the location of the incoming internet connection resulted in compromised coverage.

When creating an enterprise Wi-Fi design using the fabric of the structure to block signals is often key to channel re-use. In a domestic situation this is much more challenging because you probably haven’t got lots of structured cat6 cabling.

The simple reality is walls in many houses block Wi-Fi to a greater or lesser extent. My tiny terrace house had all solid walls with 25dB attenuation. The new build was timber frame with all internal drywall but to comply with UK fire regs this was lined with foil which, again, did a number on RF propagation. The 1970s house has practically RF transparent drywall upstairs and extremely RF obstructive blockwork downstairs.

To get around this common issue ISPs and various manufacturers have come up with complicated Wi-Fi mesh products. These are better than the O.G. Wi-Fi extenders of old, but in practice not much.

I’ve spent a LOT of time trying to help a friend position his BT Wi-Fi discs just so around the house so they have a good connection back to the router, possibly via each other, and can be plugged in, and are not in a stupid place – not easy.

So what’s the answer? Much like working on a 16th Century building that was all thick stone walls and wooden floors, floors and ceilings offer much less of an obstacle to RF than walls in many situations.

Treat these houses as individual floors and they each need two to four APs to provide coverage, fairly ridiculous for the square metres we’re talking about. However RF travels in three dimensions, not two. Placing one AP in the loft/attic provides great coverage across the whole house.

When the 1970s house was refurbished CAT6a was installed throughout, because I’m a network engineer that’s why, including into the loft and, yet again, despite planning for additional APs, I’ve found a single AP at the top of the house provides great coverage and performance.

So if you’re struggling to get Wi-Fi coverage across your house, before you start running cables to rooms, deploying APs over powerline all over the place, or breaking out the mesh, try putting the router in the attic.

Practically, a good use of the mesh approach would be to stick one or two mesh APs in the attic, ensuring they can both communicate with the router.

good luck 🙂