Hey everyone, looking for some advice on how to fix my home Wi-Fi without buying a pile of random gear and regretting it later. My house has a network box in the hallway closet where the ISP line comes in. The ISP gateway is in that closet right now with its Wi-Fi turned off. There are also two Ethernet jacks around the house — one downstairs in the living room and one upstairs in a spare bedroom. Both run back to that closet. Currently, I have a regular router sitting in the living room acting as an access point.The problem is my home office is upstairs on the opposite side of the house from that living room AP. The signal up there is absolute trash. I really don’t want to drill holes or run new cables if I can avoid it. Since there’s that unused Ethernet jack upstairs in the spare bedroom, can I leverage that somehow? Should I replace my router with a mesh kit, or just add another AP upstairs? What would be the cleanest way to set this up?
Dude, you already have the thing everyone wishes they had: a home run with Ethernet upstairs. Don’t overthink it or waste money on a wireless mesh kit.Wired backhaul beats wireless mesh every single time. Since you have that unused jack upstairs, your best move is to drop a small Access Point (AP) up there.
Your topology should basically look like this:ISP Gateway (closet) → Main Router/Switch (closet) → Patch Panel → Downstairs AP + Upstairs AP.Just link both wall jacks back to your main routing gear in the central box, configure both APs with the same SSID/password for seamless roaming, and you’re golden. No drilling required.
You already have the ethernet jack upstairs, so don’t waste cash on a mesh kit. You just need to figure out where to put the AP.Just download NetSpot or whatever, throw a rough sketch of your floor plan in there, and play around with virtual routers. Test your current setup vs adding an AP at that upstairs jack. If the app shows the office is still a dead zone from that jack, then the outlet is just in a bad spot. If it clears up, you’re good. Just buy a cheap AP and call it a day. Map it out first so you don’t guess.
@Feeling-Paramedic649 Oh, that’s actually an interesting idea. I didn’t think about testing different AP locations before buying anything.
Mesh is fine when you don’t have Ethernet. You have Ethernet.Use Ethernet.