This post is for the non-networking folks as a word of caution above all else. This is a very unplanned post and will likely be more of a rant.
The internet has quickly and easily become the foundation for most of our lives and social interactions. Many companies are now delivering voice services over the same wire as the internet, to most locations, and certainly newly built areas. Internet access has become the key tenant on which all other communication, whether personal or business, is done. To that end, I would like to express how important it is to do things in a way that makes sense.
It's impossible for me to advise every person on what to do, and I hope these posts are finding their way to the people that need them. While I might not be able to help every individual directly, I'm trying to. I'm on reddit and lemmy, and almost daily, I'm answering questions with the number one concern among all cases being how expensive a solution is. Cost is not the thing you need to be concerned about here folks. Reliability and longevity are vastly better arguments. So many people get caught up on not spending over x dollars on their network that they completely miss the point of it all.
It seems to be a common misconception that a router is a router is a router. The mindset being, if it provides you with WiFi internet, then nothing else really matters, just buy the newest WiFi number and find the cheapest option, and be done with it; but as many have found out the hard way, that's not how this works. It's not how any of this works. I cannot express the number of horror stories of people buying cheap, off the shelf, wireless routers, that do not serve their needs. This is prevalent, and companies will sell you anything they can market in a way to make it enticing for you to buy, while cutting every corner, making the product little more than ewaste right from the factory. This is a plague, and it's not getting better. It's perpetrated by ISPs too, as so many are still handing out half-baked, garbage router/modems, not suitable for anybody except the smallest of connected homes.
When putting these devices up to any scrutiny, regardless of manufacturer, they fall apart quickly when you start loading them up with users. I can hear it already, the chorus of people saying "but there's only x people in my family, I don't need much".... yes you do. Sure, you may only have 2 people in your household (as an example), but each person has a cellphone, WiFi connected watch, tablet, laptop, and any number of various IoT things, including TV's smart speakers, lights, switches, buttons... even your damned washing machine and fridge has WiFi now. So no, you're not "just 2 people" you're 2 people with a buttload of WiFi connected crap.
Once upon a time, you could easily head-count and estimate how much you need, but with everything that historically wasn't smart, becoming smart, and IoT stuff being a household staple, you're loaded to bear with random WiFi devices you don't give any thought to. Yes, your apple TV counts. Historically, one of my local ISPs used an infamous modem/router combo called the "2wire", aka model 2701HG-G. This unit was INFAMOUSLY bad, yet most home-users at the time didn't notice. The model has been decommissioned by everyone. This was released at a time where IoT wasn't even a thing anyone said, it had not been defined yet. The unit was fine for a couple of wireless devices, and one or two wired devices, but would fall over around the 8-10 user mark. More would just make it fall over faster. Clients would experience slow or unresponsive connections, if they could connect at all. Moreover, this problem only seemed to get worse over time. The longer the unit was powered on, the more likely it would be to fail. This unit, and others like it, are why the first bit of advice from your ISP has always been to "restart the modem" for troubleshooting. Rebooting the unit would generally fix the problems with it, for a while.
This is not a solution. It was so common, some of the first IoT class devices were literally smart plugs that would sit between your wall and the modem, so if the WiFi stopped working it would automatically disconnect the device from power, and reconnect it a few seconds later, to force it to restart. This is a bad solution to a problem that shouldn't exist. Simply due to the corner-cutting of these devices, it was a product that was needed. These devices only made me grumpy. Their mere existence flew in the face of what should be, and the fact that they were made, and even popular, angers me. I'm not angry at the people who invented it, nor the people that used it, I'm angry at the ISPs and companies that allowed such ewaste to be sold as a product that requires this kind of fix from a third party to make it work reliably, in any form.
Modem/routers have gotten better. ISPs have stepped up their game for this but not nearly by enough. Even the third-party consumer-focused routers haven't really gotten much better. Sure, you can support many more clients than the 2wire could with newer modem/routers, but by no means are they any comparison for a proper solution.... Historically, routers didn't have WiFi. Nothing built in anyways. These all-in-one routers, especially cheap AIOs are still garbage, they're just better garbage. They're still ewaste in my eyes. Most modem/routers cannot do what they would imply on paper. They don't have the horsepower, and the programming is usually half-baked. They have memory leaks, which is what I suspect was the problem with the 2wire, cheap hardware, they're underpowered, and under-spec'd; all of this so that the ISP can save a buck providing you with something they try to convince you is "good enough". I've long given up on ISPs providing any devices that are of any value.
The good news is that most modem/routers can operate in "bridged mode", which basically disables the router functions, and limits them to modem operations only - aka, converting from whatever connection the ISP uses, whether fiber, DSL, or cable (DOCSIS), to ethernet. In this mode, most ISP provided equipment is very sufficient, with more than enough power and capability to do that job; it is honestly the only saving grace of the uplift in equipment that ISPs have made. Beyond bridged mode operation, these units are effectively paperweights, unable to do the basic tasks required of the modern home network. I expect this will not change, at least, not anytime soon.
Moving on from that, even if you're keen enough to buy your own router, and put the modem into bridged mode, you're probably still using hot garbage for your network. People tend to buy cheap, off the shelf (of their local best buy or something), devices which are marginally better, but still closer to ewaste than a useful piece of equipment. Cheap network device manufacturers know this, and they know, for consumers, the key requirement is cost. Because of this, most inexpensive routers are in the same boat; this boat has fewer holes in it, but it's still sinking. Most will balk at consumer wireless routers that are more than $100-200. I understand it, you don't want to waste your hard-earned money, but by buying cheap, that's exactly what you're doing. The under $100 market is rife with old, outdated, and otherwise underpowered devices. Many won't stand up to the requirements of 1Gbps internet, nevermind anything faster, and as internet service gets faster and faster, you're going to be left very far behind in terms of capability and performance, dramatically shortening the time your bargain router is going to last.
WiFi is getting faster and faster, with some pretty serious caveats which are slowly going to ruin the airspace in populated areas, the solution so far has been to absorb more and more airspace with WiFi to meet the needs for speed and diversity, which is horrible; but a whole other matter. Fact is, the right way to fix the problem is to have many low powered wireless access points strewn around your home. This reduces the overall impact and footprint of the wireless networks, avoiding conflicts to neighbors networks; unfortunately, everyone would need to be on-board with this to make it viable, and since woody next door doesn't even want to talk to you without accusing you of something, or yelling, it would be near impossible to get everyone on-board with changing how you do WiFi so it can be better for everyone.
The key thing holding this back as a future, is the fact that near-zero homes, built before the last 10 years, had any ethernet built into the structure. There's a non-trivial number of homes still being built without it, and even those that come with ethernet, are not getting the right ethernet. Most new-build homes that get ethernet have a handful of ethernet placed into walls around the home, nothing in the ceiling. Most access points worth their salt, are ceiling mounted. So where the heck are the APs supposed to go? Some companies have tried to bridge this gap by making wall-mounted APs, this is a good step, but builders need to get with the times. Ceiling ethernet for APs is the most important thing to have for modern builds, allowing common folks, who have little to no prior networking, construction, or other experience, to install fairly good, well suited, wireless networks in their homes with little more than a screwdriver and some ethernet patch cables.
I have to commend Ubiquiti here. Their UDR product has an access point built in, with a controller for it, and it functions as a consumer modem, and has 2x PoE ports for additional access points (or cameras, etc). It's not expensive, around $200, and additional access points start at $130 for a U6 lite at the time of this post. Provided you have the required cabling, you can have a three AP system for under $500, which will be good to go for the next 10 years. One mark against them is the limit of using a single 1Gbps ethernet link for WAN. As available internet speeds exceed 1Gbps, these become less useful. I know many are still stuck in the sub 1Gbps space, including me... but this is slowly but surely changing. Hopefully they will release a new UDR type unit, with much the same capabilities but with a multi-gig (2.5/5G) or 10G WAN connection sometime in the future. This is the way things should go, with a few well-placed APs, running relatively low transmit power, and one central main unit that's also an AP, you can quickly, easily, and very reliably serve your home for internet connectivity. low power means that as the signal attenuates outside the bounds of your home, it will have very little, if any impact to your neighbors, and if all systems by the inexpensive consumer networking vendors had a similar product, which all your neighbors started using, then WiFi would be improved for all.
All of this circles around the main problem, which is having a spot where you can put the access points to best serve the needs of your home. Most condos do ethernet wiring by default now, and newly-built homes at the very least, have the option to, but again, not the right wiring. I have yet to see any pre-built home that has a single ethernet in the ceiling. The builder could easily take their floor plans and designs to a professional wireless networking person, such as myself, but not necessarily me, for planning. That pro could then run the plans through a WiFi planning software, and find the optimal WiFi placements to best serve the home with the least amount of transmission power. At that point, it would be a fairly trivial matter for the builder to simply put ethernet for access point drops right where it would be most ideal to place an access point. This takes all the thinking out of the process for anyone buying these homes, and long-term would ensure that neighborhoods, apartments and condos which are built with this in mind, would be good places to be with great WiFi options.
The whole process would be to move in, install the APs in the pre-designated locations, and that's it. You as the occupant of such a property would need to do little more than buy the equipment, get up on a ladder and install it by screwing the mounting plate to the ceiling, plugging in the AP, and securing it to the mounting plate. Once that's done, plug in the required cables at the network box, and configure it to your liking, or by following a quick-start program. The system would otherwise set itself up, and you, the end user, would in turn, get very good, very reliable, and very fast WiFi, with very little effort. It would be about the same effort as installing a smoke detector, something I think most of us have done, or at least know how to do.
So my advice to anyone reading, if you're planning on buying a new build, ask for this. If needed, find a professional to do the mapping, give the placements to the builder and ask them to put ethernet in the ceiling in the designated locations. If you're already in a place that's finished and you have no ethernet in the ceiling; then if you have access to an attic, you can either do it yourself, or hire a low-voltage contractor to install the required connections, if you don't have access to the ceiling via an attic, then you will need to cut open walls, etc, to run the cables, and it only gets more difficult from there - thus, getting this idea into the hands of builders is the most important thing to do; so this becomes a thing of the past.
Look, as you may know from my previous posts, I'm not a fan of WiFi. Wired when you can, wireless when you have to; but not everyone subscribes to that, or can do that, in a practical sense. So having the ability to quickly and easily install WiFi in your living space that serves you well, is going to become very important in the coming years. Getting your hands on good routers that support APs, such as the UDR I've mentioned, will be the other half to this. Everyone has preference on what consumer networking vendor they like, and not everyone is a fan of how Ubiquiti does things, so having options in that market is going to be important. Most rely on some form of wireless router, plus a PoE switch to make all this work, and it's embarrassing. Even very inexpensive options on this front can easily be more costly than the UDR options, and they can easily be worse, as most consumer wireless routers don't support adding APs, so you may end up having two disjointed systems, or having to turn off the wireless on your router entirely.
The hardware will come, it will catch up. Without the wiring in place, and the opportunity for people to use such a system as the UDR represents, then this idea will die. IMO, the system the UDR represents, what it could be, and how prevalent it could be, is the idea worth fighting for. If we, the consumers, are not asking for it, and/or buying into it, then it will not make it passed this point. If the UDR or similar systems become a popular option for homeowners, then the future isn't as interference-prone as it currently appears. Right now, people are buying a single wireless router, placing it wherever they can, usually not in any ideal location, and cranking the power to the max just to get signal to the furthest reaches of their home, this is creating significant interference due to the massive transmit power of these units. There are MESH based solutions trying to fix this problem, by putting small "pods" or similar which hang off power outlets in distant corners of your home, but no MESH system will ever compare to a properly wired access point system in terms of reliability and speed.
To everyone thinking $500 is too much, let me put it this way. Say you own the system for 5 years, if you adjust the cost of the system, over 5 years, it's a grand total of $8.30/mo. Now consider how much you're spending monthly for internet - at all - and how much the modem/router rental is from that cost. Yeah, exactly; and your ISP is making PROFIT in that time, for every month you are "renting" their equipment. If anyone is saying "but I don't have a modem rental fee, it's free", no it's not, and yes, you're paying for it, it's just that they've moved that cost from one you can see, into the service fees for the internet. You're paying more for internet so you can have a "free" modem. Modem fees are generally $5-10/month, so even a $500 system, as long as it lasts 5+ years, you're spending about the same, or less for your own system, that is more reliable, better in almost every way, and more robust, than whatever you could be provided by the ISP. If you consider that a good system like this may serve your needs for more than 5 years, that cost only goes down. If you spend that time putting aside $10/month into a savings account, or hiding it in your mattress or something, you can fully replace the system in 5 years with one that's just as good, or better. Considering most people pay more for that per month on something like coffee, that's a downright bargain, considering what it provides to you. Netflix, facetime, reddit (or other social media of choice), chat with everyone you know, games.... the value is enormous, isn't having that reliable and good, worth more than you're spending on folgers?
When you think about it, you'd be an idiot not to want this. Save your money by buying something better. It will last longer and you'll be happier for it.
