Best place for an AP in a 3-floor house? 

Wi-Fi Design & Planning
1

I’m trying to improve WiFi coverage in our house without turning it into a museum of mesh nodes.

The router is on the ground floor near one end of the house. Coverage downstairs is great and the middle floor is mostly fine, but upstairs is pretty inconsistent. One bedroom is usable, another drops to a weak connection, and the far side of the floor is basically a coin toss.

The funny part is that some of those rooms are almost directly above the router, so I assumed they’d be fine.

We have an open staircase running through all three floors, and I have one realistic opportunity to run Ethernet for an extra access point while some renovation work is being done.

Possible locations are:

  • middle-floor landing near the stairs

  • middle-floor ceiling roughly below the weak upstairs rooms

  • upstairs hallway

I only want to run the cable once.

How would you decide which location actually makes the most sense for coverage across all three floors?

2

Don’t think of the house as one flat floor plan. What’s between the levels matters just as much as the horizontal distance. Timber, concrete, insulation, metal ducting, foil-backed materials… all of that changes the answer.

3

@AutoPilot_2012 Ground to middle floor is mostly timber. The upper floor was renovated later and has a lot more insulation. Staircase is open all the way from downstairs to the top floor.

4

That open stairwell makes the landing interesting. Not saying it’s automatically the best spot, but you may get a much easier RF path up through the stairs than straight through the upper floor.

5

Since you’ve got three levels and only one cable run, this is actually a decent case for predictive planning. NetSpot can do multi-floor projects now.

6

Honestly I’d still just buy a 3-pack mesh and put one on each floor.