Wi-Fi in an Older Home

In an older house, buy the TP-Link Deco X55 three-pack and wire at least one hop. The reason is specific: old building methods put metal inside walls, floors and sometimes insulation, and metal does not attenuate a radio signal so much as reflect it — which is a problem no amount of transmit power solves. If the house has coax from a cable-television era, a pair of ScreenBeam MoCA adapters is the better first purchase.

What is actually in your walls

The usual advice for difficult houses is about thickness, and thickness is measurable: Keenetic publishes attenuation by obstacle, and a 15 cm interior wall costs 15-20 dB at 2.4 GHz while a 30.5 cm bearing wall costs 20-25 dB and leaves roughly a tenth of the open-space distance. Those are the figures behind our masonry guide.

Older houses add a different problem, and it behaves differently. Four culprits:

• Lath and plaster with metal lath. Plaster over wooden lath is merely dense. Plaster over expanded metal lath — common in houses and apartments built roughly from the 1920s to the 1950s — is effectively a wire screen inside the wall, and a screen reflects radio rather than letting it through.
• Foil-backed insulation and radiant barriers. Retrofitted insulation boards and attic radiant barriers are often aluminum-faced. One of those in a floor or a ceiling can cut a vertical hop dead, which is why upstairs coverage sometimes fails in a house where it worked before the insulation went in.
• Cast-iron radiators and pipe runs. Large metal objects in the middle of rooms, usually under windows — exactly where people put a router.
• Chimney breasts and flues. A masonry stack with a metal liner, sitting in the center of the floor plan, splitting the house in two as far as a radio is concerned.

The practical difference between mass and metal matters. More transmit power helps a little against mass and almost nothing against a reflective screen — and in any case transmit power is legally capped, so every system you can buy sits at the same ceiling. What beats metal is going around it: another radio on the far side, or a cable.

Why node count beats node quality here

On most of this site we argue for tri-band systems, because a dedicated backhaul band stops a mesh from halving your speed. An old house with metal in it is where that argument weakens. A tri-band Wi-Fi 7 system reserves 6 GHz for the link between nodes, and 6 GHz is the band least able to cross a dense or reflective barrier. Put metal lath between two nodes and the expensive dedicated lane collapses to the slow shared band anyway.

So the money goes on units and cable rather than on radios: a three-node dual-band system, wired where possible, beats a two-node premium system shouting through a wire screen. The mechanism is on the backhaul page and the trade-off in tri-band versus dual-band mesh.

Wiring an old house without drilling it

You probably do not need to make holes. Three routes exist in most older housing stock:

• Coax. Houses wired for cable television have coax behind the televisions, and MoCA adapters turn any two of those outlets into a shielded gigabit-class Ethernet link that ignores the wall completely.
• Mains wiring. Powerline is the fallback, with the honest caveat that old wiring and multiple circuits hurt it — which is why the G.hn pick above exists. When powerline works and when it does not.
• Existing chases. Old houses often have redundant service runs — disused chimney flues, old pipe boxing, cable channels from a previous installation — that a cable can follow between floors without any new holes. If you find one, plan the house as a hybrid wired and Wi-Fi network and the problem stops being a Wi-Fi problem.

Placement rules that matter more in an old house

eero publishes the clearest version of the general rule: 20 to 30 feet between units, no more than 50 feet on a wireless link, never inside the dead zone, and roughly halfway between floor and ceiling. In an old house, cut those distances rather than stretching them, count obstacles instead of feet, and prefer a vertical hop through a plain timber floor over a horizontal one through metal lath.

Also move the router off the windowsill behind the radiator, which is where the cable entered the house in 1954 and where it has sat ever since. Router placement covers this, and node placement covers the mesh version. If the problem is specifically that nothing reaches the top floor, Wi-Fi not reaching upstairs is the direct diagnosis.

When not to buy mesh at all

• One bad room behind one obstacle. An extender or a powerline adapter costs far less than replacing the network.
• You can run one cable to the far end. Then an access point there beats any mesh system for less money.
• The speed is bad next to the router too. Not the building — mesh versus a better router settles it in five minutes.

How we picked

We do not run a test lab. Rankings here are built from the manufacturers' published specifications, measurements taken by independent outlets that do have labs, and the structural reasoning on this site about what a given house or job actually needs. Every product was checked as currently sold before it was included. Where a figure appears it is attributed and linked in Sources; where we have no basis for a claim, it is left out. Our methodology sets out exactly what we will and will not assert.