Single-story house. Floor plan attached. The living/family area is pretty close to the middle of the house, so my first thought was to just put one decent router there and call it a day.
Main rooms I care about are the home office, bedrooms, entertainment room, and the outdoor retreat. I don’t need crazy speeds everywhere, but I do want stable Wi-Fi across the house without playing “which room works today”.
So for a layout like this, would one router in the middle actually be enough, or is this the kind of house where I should stop kidding myself and just go with mesh?
I’d try one good router in the family/living area first. That’s pretty central, and for a single-story house that might be enough unless your walls are weird. People say that a centrally placed router often works fine, but the real wildcard is building materials, not just house size.
This depends way more on what the walls are made of than people think. Drywall and an open-ish layout? One router might do surprisingly well.
Brick, concrete, foil insulation, heavy plumbing walls, etc.? A whole different story.
mesh is fine, but wired APs are better if you ever have the option.
There are tools that let you simulate coverage before you start buying gear. NetSpot is pretty decent for that — you can upload the floor plan, place a virtual router, and see whether a single router in the middle is likely to cover the house well enough.
