I live in an old five-story city building (1900) with bedrooms on opposite sides of the one-story apartment. My bedroom gets great signal because I am right next to the living room where the router is. Unfortunately, my partner gets a very poor signal - it’s basically a crapshoot at night whether or not the smart TV will connect or not. He is on the opposite side of the apartment from the living room with a bathroom and kitchen between him and the router (yes we sleep in different rooms it is heavenly).

We don’t have much ability to relocate the router and we don’t want to run a mile of ugly ethernet cable from the living room to the back room. I’m quickly getting overwhelmed by the other options out there and the negative feedback surrounding most of them.

I don’t think I’m a candidate for PowerLine because I live in an older apartment and that seems to be a problem? Plus there’s a lot of negative feedback surrounding it.

I was planning to buy a Repeater for Christmas but the feedback surrounding them is often horrendous. I don’t know if that’s a matter of expectations though - he is not a heavy internet user, gamer, etc. We are just looking for something that will let him browse the internet on his phone without it hanging and stream Netflix/Max. Any improvement on what we have now would be a bit of a win.

That said - I never heard of mesh networking until today. It sounds promising, but I don’t know if there would be any adverse affect on my own bedroom which does need a higher speed and is currently working the way I want it to. Would the mesh network potentially disrupt my currently functioning ecosystem in any way (e.g. can I still open ports, use my regular VPN, etc.)?

Thanks!