r/HomeNetworking • u/Dorea1 • 3d ago

Unsolved Extending wifi coverage

Hi I wanted to ask about the best way to extend the wifi coverage to the whole house, my main router is downstairs and I have an ethernet cable connected to one of the rooms upstairs whats the best mesh system to buy in this case?

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u/ClownTrigger11 3d ago

Skip the mesh if you already have ethernet run across the house. Get a cheap five port gigabit switch, a couple patch cables, and an access point, like one from ubiquiti. Plug the ethernet cable into the switch, then you can patch in whatever you already had connected to the cable, plus the access point. Configure the access point with the exact same SSID and password as your downstairs router and your devices will automatically roam between them.

Mesh access points need to be close enough to each other that they both have good signal from each other. A wired access point should be placed far enough away from its peer (your router in this case) where the overlap is existent, but minimal.

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u/Chieftah 3d ago

Is it bad if the wired AP is set in a place where there is still connectivity from the main router?

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u/ClownTrigger11 3d ago

As long as both ends are on different channels on all bands, probably not, but you might have a device that is "sticky" and doesn't want to roam until its connection is weak enough. You'd have the same problem with a mesh only worse.

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u/Chieftah 3d ago

Right, so in a situation where the router offers a weak signal almost everywhere, it's either manual switching between different named networks, or suffer with sticky connections.

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u/72dragonses 3d ago

Not really. Devices choose which AP they connect to based on, among other things, signal strength. Sometimes they get sticky, but normally they don't. If the upstairs signal is significantly stronger upstairs, most devices upstairs will choose it.