Blog / networking
Why good Wi-Fi starts with wires
Wireless is the last metre, not the whole network. Why access points need cables, what mesh can't fix, and where the wires should go.
The best Wi-Fi I've ever set up in a house had more cable in it than a lot of small offices. That sounds backwards, but it's the whole trick: Wi-Fi is the last few metres of your network, not the network itself. Every home I've seen with genuinely good wireless has wires doing the real work behind the walls.
If your Wi-Fi is bad, the temptation is to buy a stronger router or add another mesh puck. Sometimes that helps. More often the actual problem is that the signal is being asked to do a job cable should be doing.
Backhaul is the part nobody explains
When you stand in the basement and load a page, your data hops from your phone to the nearest access point, and then it has to travel from that access point back to your modem. That return trip is called backhaul.
With a wired access point, backhaul is a cable: fast, consistent, immune to walls. With a typical mesh kit, backhaul is more Wi-Fi. The satellite unit talks to the main unit over the air, through the same brick, ductwork, and in-floor heating that weakened the signal in the first place. Every wireless hop costs you speed, and a mesh node placed where the signal is already poor just rebroadcasts a poor signal with a stronger bar display.
That's why a house can show "full bars" everywhere and still feel slow in half the rooms. Bars measure the link to the nearest node, not the quality of the path behind it.
Access points belong where people are, and that takes a cable
Routers live wherever the internet enters the house, usually a basement corner or a closet by the electrical panel, because that's where the installer's cable was. It is almost never where you actually use the internet.
A proper access point goes near the middle of the space it serves, often on a ceiling, the way you'd place a smoke detector. The only thing stopping most people from putting one there is the lack of a cable in the ceiling. With PoE (power over Ethernet), one cable carries both data and power, so there's no outlet needed either. One well-placed wired access point routinely outperforms three mesh pucks scattered on shelves.
What mesh is actually good at
I'm not against mesh. For a rental, a small home, or finished walls you can't open, a mesh kit is a reasonable compromise, and the better kits let you wire the nodes together later, which quietly turns them into real access points.
But mesh is a workaround for missing cable, and it has a ceiling. Video calls that stutter only in the evening, a garage camera that drops out, game consoles that lag upstairs: these are backhaul problems, and no amount of extra pucks fixes backhaul. Adding nodes past two or three usually makes things worse, because they start competing with each other for the same air.
If the walls are open, run the cable
The cheapest time to wire a house is when it's already torn apart. If you're renovating this spring, a few hundred dollars of Cat6 pulled before the drywall goes up buys you decades of options; the same cable fished through finished walls later can cost ten times that in labour. I wrote about this in more detail in decisions to make before the drywall goes on, but the short version is: one cable to the ceiling of each main living area, and one to any spot where a TV or desk will live. Deciding exactly where is the kind of planning worth doing before the electrician shows up, not after.
You don't have to use them all right away. An unused cable in the wall costs nothing. A missing one costs a wall.
If you're in Southern Ontario and need the physical work done, the crew at RelayPoint Technologies does exactly this kind of structured wiring. And if you're not sure what your house actually needs, I do home network assessments that tell you where the cables and access points should go before you spend a dollar on gear. Good Wi-Fi gets drawn on a floor plan before it gets bought off a shelf.