By Home Type

You know your house before you know the product. Floors, footprint and what is inside the walls decide almost everything about the right Wi-Fi setup — more than square footage, and far more than any specification on a box. This section starts from the building.

The four things about a house that matter

1. Floors, not area. Vertical coverage is genuinely harder than horizontal. Router antennas radiate in a doughnut around their own axis — strong sideways, weak straight up — so a router standing upright downstairs is built for downstairs. Spread the same square footage over more floors and you need more radios.
2. Shape. A compact square 2,500 square feet is a far easier problem than a long narrow 2,000, because the worst-case diagonal is shorter. Two houses of identical area can need two radios or four.
3. What is in the walls. The dominant variable, and the one people cannot see. Drywall on studs costs you very little. Brick, block, stone and concrete cost a great deal. And anything containing metal — plaster on metal lath, foil-faced insulation board, tiled walls on a mesh substrate, rebar in concrete — is far worse than its thickness suggests, because metal reflects radio rather than letting it pass.
4. Where the line enters. If the modem is in a far corner, your first radio is already spent getting the signal to the middle of the house.

The zoning idea, which is the most useful thing here

For a house with masonry in it, stop thinking about coverage and start thinking about zones. Group the rooms that are connected by doorways or studwork — each group is one zone. Put one radio in each zone. Then join the zones with something that is not air: Ethernet if you can run it, coax with MoCA adapters if you cannot, electrical wiring with powerline as a fallback.

That reframing solves the house that a central router cannot. It also explains why a cheap mesh system with a wired backhaul beats an expensive one trying to punch through a brick chimney breast — the walls are the problem, and a cable is how you stop caring about them. The full masonry guide.

Vertical houses need a wire in the middle

Two floors is one wireless hop and works fine. Three floors is where it breaks down, because the top floor ends up relayed through a node on the middle floor — two hops, and a wireless mesh loses throughput at each one.

The fix is one cable to the middle floor, and tall houses are the easiest houses to wire vertically: there is usually a stacked service core, a cupboard that lines up on every floor, or a boxed-in soil pipe. Tall houses also almost always have coax on several floors. How to plan a three-floor house.

Apartments are the opposite problem

Everything above is about distance and obstruction. An apartment has neither — any modern router reaches every corner of 900 square feet. What an apartment has is twenty other networks competing for the same airtime, which needs a completely different shopping list: a 6 GHz band rather than big antennas, and lower transmit power rather than higher. The apartment guide covers why turning the power up makes things worse.

How to check your plan before you spend

Whatever your house shape, the verification is the same. Walk every room with one device, note signal strength and a speed test at the height you actually use it, and look for two things: a smooth taper (distance) versus a cliff edge between adjacent rooms (a wall). Aim for −67 dBm or better in every room you care about — the conventional floor for reliable video calling, and a far more useful target than any coverage claim. The method is here.