If we don’t want our homes to eat Wi-Fi signals, companies will need to start eating the cost of choosing better Wi-Fi-penetrating materials — or, at the very least, they will need to stop putting fiber connection points literally inside walls.
Or you could just USE THE DAMN ETHERNET DROPS THEY SO KINDLY BUILT FOR YOU.
Of course you’re going to get shit signal if you put one AP in a metal box and expect it to cover the whole house. that’s why they built that box and ran Ethernet throughout the house.
Ideally houses would have ceiling drops for Ethernet. Consumers are getting all these wireless mesh networks that cause more problems than they solve.
I put a Ubiquiti long-range Wifi 6 AP on my ceiling, fed with a Dream Machine Pro SE. Google Fiber just kept saying, “You know, we could ‘upgrade’ you to our mesh stuff for free!” Ha, no thanks.
Btw, this is not an endorsement of Google Fiber. I just cancelled it. They can’t or won’t handle chronic infrastructure issues. Multiple outages a day, every day (as confirmed by their app) for weeks to months, and they still wouldn’t even acknowledge that there was a chronic problem, much less tell me any status of a permanent resolution. That service is total trash.
Google Fiber just kept saying, “You know, we could ‘upgrade’ you to our mesh stuff for free!” Ha, no thanks.
You’re much nicer than me. My response would’ve been something like “that shit is a downgrade. Your suggestion is bad, and you should feel bad.” I’m just so fucking sick and tired of assholes trying to upsell me…
Agreed. We requested 2 ceiling drops when building our house (the basement mesh AP is in the network closet on its base). Used PoE to power the 2 mesh APs. Works great for full coverage.
Addendum: Of course, our network box is plastic so it’s wireless transparent. Of If I had to do it again I’d cut the cost of the network box and just use pegboard. Can shut the damn thing anyway with how it’s set up. I’ve got way too many devices to cram in there. Oh well, hindsight and all.
If they’re wired back to a switch, they’re not “mesh” APs. Having a wireless AP-to-AP backhaul connection is what “mesh” is.
If we’re making requests, please use conduit for wires. Pulling new cable (cat x, fiber, whatever) is such much easier that way.
I wish I could upvote multiple times: 20 years ago, I sent so much time crawling around the attic and running cable through walls, now I’m looking to upgrade but am not willing to do that again. I really wish I had taken a little more time and run conduit
I have an old old house, as in serval generations of wire running through it. It’s a nightmare to redo. Been through conduit every chance I can, no more spidernests and crisscrossing wires for me!
There’s been an unfortunate trend of newly-built houses not running Ethernet cables. Here in Canada, at least. You can still run them yourself, but the average person probably isn’t going to bother with it.
We have so many bigger problems with modern homes than worrying about WiFi penetration…
You know how it costs to add a WiFi access point? Maybe $100? How many thousands of dollars will it cost to change the construction materials?
I’m usually a fan of The Verge but this is dogshit journalism.
He says at the end how he “knows this stuff” because he’s a tech journalist.
But he doesn’t know what an Access Point is? Or that those built in wireless routers are dog shit with small antennas and terrible range.
He’s probably the kind of person that would bitch that his backyard doesn’t get wifi from the ISP provided router on the other side of the house.
I try not to shit on articles too much because I understand that the vast majority of writers these days are given a prompt and talking points by their editors but…
I have the privilege of knowing how to troubleshoot this stuff on my own largely due to my profession as a tech journalist. To others, this stuff is a foreign language. Knowing how to set up a home internet system is not a skill everyone has, and the complicated steps required to do it properly make moving to a new place more stressful, especially if you work remotely and need the internet to earn a paycheck.
Clearly setting up a home internet system is also not a skill this tech writer has.
This is a solved problem. It is a mesh network. Yes, you can spend insane amounts of money for a ubiquiti solution (and they are nice…). Or you can wait for a sale on a google/amazon solution. Or you can just look into stuff like the tp-link omada system where your access points are 30-40 bucks and can act as both repeaters and extenders, depending on your setup.
Don’t get me wrong, ethernet is always better. But it really is not necessary in the vast majority of use cases. And considering the cost of building or renovating a house, I would not look into drywall alternatives in addition to adding ethernet drops.
Also, if they think THAT networking panel is a mess then… I very much question if they have ever touched an ethernet cable before. I have seen top of the line data/computing centers which were less neatly cabled than that picture.
Don’t get me wrong, ethernet is always better.
That’s the crazy part that deserves shitting on: this guy has ethernet in every room, yet he’s complaining about (checks notes) not being able to easily use something worse! I mean, just look at this paragraph:
A plethora of architects, civil engineers, and project managers across Orange and Los Angeles counties in California all told me the same thing: Wi-Fi-penetrating materials typically aren’t a consideration unless it’s a large structure like an office building or warehouse; telecom technicians are called in then, but mainly to help with wiring. However, those same people told me they’ve been able to reduce construction costs significantly by wiring residences for ethernet as they are building them.
That “plethora” of experts is right, and the author is just fucking nuts.
I have never been in any residential situation where just parking a bog standard router roughly central to the building, or even just right next to wherever the cable guy punched into the house, was not perfectly adequate for all users and their myriad devices to receive a reliable wi-fi signal. “Wi-fi penetrating” materials or not. This cat is either residing in a McMansion of epic proportions, or he’s overblowing his issues to pad out his word count.
That is not to say that the wiring situation and cabling situation you may inherit will be adequate for tech nerds (myself possibly included) but for the average citizen just tucking your ISP provided router somewhere out of sight is all it takes and is just fine.
You want to talk about headaches? The house I’m living in was built in the 1920’s and it’s all plaster. I have nowhere to run Cat6, other than stapled to the underside of the floorboards from the basement, and surface mount boxes coming up thruogh the floor. For my upstairs runs I have to run it in channel up the rear corners of closets where it’s out of sight, and punch up through the ceiling and the floor above. Pulling cable through the walls is a non-starter; most of the interior walls don’t even have an air gap between what should be the inside faces. Pull that off and you can come back and talk to me about “hurdles.”
My house was built in the 80s. I am not aware of any special materials, but the pipes and wiring in the wall more or less kill all cell signal if you aren’t on the side of the house facing the tower (I forget the term for it, but I have the kind of baseboard heaters that use hot water). And considering a lot of other houses in the neighborhood have the same issue, it rapidly becomes one or two rooms where I have cell reception. Actually means I bother to set up a guest network on my wifi so that people who come over that I don’t trust to have access to my personal network can still receive texts and the like.
In terms of wifi? If I put the wireless access point in the living room, I more or less have signal. But my drop is in the basement (which is awesome for my server room needs) and that means upstairs has a LOT of dead zones.
It really depends on construction, but this is WHY office buildings are designed around this. I just don’t think apartment complexes need to be because you are going to have an ethernet drop in every unit anyway.
Mesh networks are severely limited in terms of mbps/throughput. They also use their own throughput channel to communicate and sync with each other, further reducing available bandwidth.
They also can introduce a lot of latency and packet loss if you’re into gaming that needs to be taken into consideration.
They have a purpose and a use, but if you want to get the benefits of modern internet speeds, you should set up a wired network and only use wireless protocols for small, difficult to wire, devices.
If there are Ethernet ports in every room (as the article describes) then the back haul happens over wire. No unusual packet loss or latency with a few plug and play pucks throughout the house.
Yeah. Have most just act in mesh mode for the wired internet so that your mobile devices (which are generally latency insensitive) have optimal coverage. If there is a spot that you just can’t reach and that has no drops? That is when you turn on extender mode and start taking the hit.
Also, if there is meaningful packet loss then that is generally a sign that your access points are too far apart. If the signal barely reaches the access point then it can’t really meaningfully extend the reach of the network.
This was true about older mesh systems, that’s not an issue today, you’ll see you’re ping go up a couple of ms and your mbps go down by 10 less. Speaking from experience, in a house where a single router is leaving some deadzones, mesh networks are leaps and bounds better. You can easily game on them.
I didn’t bother reading it all but seems like the writer is mostly complaining about their personal tech issues and blaming their house, which seems to have an almost ideal setup for building a good network.
Overlooking that is very possible, but I guess I expected more, isn’t The Verge a tech site?
No. They’re literally a meme for how bad they are on tech content: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/the-verges-gaming-pc-build-video
Wait, so this person is irritated about the fact that he’s not getting good signal by stuffing his Wifi router into the wall? Do they not realize they can just use one of those Ethernet lines to place the router in a more open spot? Or even have multiple APs throughout the house?
You are technically correct (the best kind of correct), but we all know that he meant UTP cable such as cat6 with 8p8c connectors.
Ethernet specs also include the physical layer so, no, it’s not even technically correct. X.25 even covered everything from physical to network. TCP covers both layer 5 and 6 (transport and session), it’s not terribly uncommon to cover more than one layer. OSI layers are more of a guideline, not rules.
