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.
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.
I would avoid Google for utilities like the fucking plague. I do not want to pay for terrible customer service on a vital service only for them to cancel it 6 months later.
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.
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!
Have you pulled the old wiring? I’ve been tempted to pull the phone wiring in my house. I suppose maybe coax also since I haven’t used that in years but it seems too early to get rid of that
In parts, I’m doing it one leg at a time from the electrical box to the next junction box (have both in place next to each other kill the circuit move the old lines I haven’t got to yet into the new box to the new source, power on and test it, remove to old line.). I’m also adding breakers so luckly that gives me more leway too.
Ohhhh, by wiring, you mean wiring. Yep, to power wiring here as well. I have an 80 year old house and the original wiring was very well done, except not grounded. It’s all the stuff added later that’s a mess.
I’m lucky enough to have 200a service, however it’s a mid-sized panel that was already full, including some poor choices by previous owners. And there was an ancient rusted fuse box for a sub panel. Anyhow, much better now but it’s a never ending spchore, and my fixes have slowed a lot - right now looking at smart switches that aren’t working right because no ground and switches do t have a neutral
Having no ground is a huge pain, gotta balance the lines well to so that big power draws (ovens, pumps, dryers, etc) don’t cause voltage fluctuations (current issue my redo is fixing slowly but surely, but it’s been burning my LEDs, getting dimmable bulbs does help though).
My data lines (currently phone lines, and cable just stapled on the outside of the house …) are in the same process of new line and replace, but starting the line from my router instead. I’m willing to do a line per room and use dumb switches and access points in the rooms with more devices. To keep my wall from looking like an old telephone switch board operator 😅
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.
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.
I would avoid Google for utilities like the fucking plague. I do not want to pay for terrible customer service on a vital service only for them to cancel it 6 months later.
I did home AV for years and the only consumer mesh system I would ever recommend is Eero. Everything else I used was total shit
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 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!
Have you pulled the old wiring? I’ve been tempted to pull the phone wiring in my house. I suppose maybe coax also since I haven’t used that in years but it seems too early to get rid of that
In parts, I’m doing it one leg at a time from the electrical box to the next junction box (have both in place next to each other kill the circuit move the old lines I haven’t got to yet into the new box to the new source, power on and test it, remove to old line.). I’m also adding breakers so luckly that gives me more leway too.
Ohhhh, by wiring, you mean wiring. Yep, to power wiring here as well. I have an 80 year old house and the original wiring was very well done, except not grounded. It’s all the stuff added later that’s a mess.
I’m lucky enough to have 200a service, however it’s a mid-sized panel that was already full, including some poor choices by previous owners. And there was an ancient rusted fuse box for a sub panel. Anyhow, much better now but it’s a never ending spchore, and my fixes have slowed a lot - right now looking at smart switches that aren’t working right because no ground and switches do t have a neutral
Having no ground is a huge pain, gotta balance the lines well to so that big power draws (ovens, pumps, dryers, etc) don’t cause voltage fluctuations (current issue my redo is fixing slowly but surely, but it’s been burning my LEDs, getting dimmable bulbs does help though).
My data lines (currently phone lines, and cable just stapled on the outside of the house …) are in the same process of new line and replace, but starting the line from my router instead. I’m willing to do a line per room and use dumb switches and access points in the rooms with more devices. To keep my wall from looking like an old telephone switch board operator 😅
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.
So if they can’t be bothered, then I’d say it’s not a big deal to them.
Hell, I couldn’t be arsed to run a wire for my TV for months. And I’ve run miles of cable, and it was trivially easy for my TV, took about an hour.