Hey everyone,

There is no real “homenetworking” community like there was on reddit so I thought I would try my luck here.

I live in a 130m^2 house (~1500sqft) that is being completely stripped. That means I am putting in 12-14 Ethernet jacks in the rooms that might need it and have to completely redo my home network setup.

It is a house from the 1950s in belgium, so 21cm thick internal brick walls, a bit thicker concrete floors on the 2 levels. It is essentially a square (8m x 9m outer dimensions), and most of the advice on the internet is built for sprawling American wood houses which have completely different absorption of wireless signals. It has central stairs and essentially 4 rooms, 2 on either side with the kitchen in the back being bigger.

The little advice that I have seen is “brick walls -> get a bunch of access points” but that doesn’t sit right with me.

  1. Currently we are using a Proximus (our ISP) modem/router in the northwest most far corner or the house and still get weak signal (enough for lower quality videos like Instagram reels) all the way in the southeast corner on the 2nd floor. It goes through 2 brick walls, a concrete floor, and a door and we can still use WiFi 6. Intuitively I would then set up something like an Asus rt-ax58u or a zenwifi XT8 mounted to the staircase wall or in the hallway in the center of the house. I don’t know if that would be strong enough to reach everything we need, but it seems better to me than a router in each corner and blasting channel noise at our neighbors’ houses since in belgium there isn’t much side-garden if any.

  2. I have a home server running a variety of local and internet-facing services for myself and family. Due to ease of wiring, I would prefer running modem -> TP-SG1SG016DE -> Wireless Router and using an Asus router. Would the TPlink kind-of-managed-switch be able to isolate the modem fron the rest of the network and just run it to my router to use the LAN of the router for the rest of the ports on my switch? It has port isolation functionality, so I assume so. Then I don’t have to run double Ethernet to the hall.

I want to go with Asus because I hear that they generally have more features than other brands. I for sure need port forwarding, QoS, disabling PnP, assigning static IP, and NAT loopback if possible so that local access of services doesn’t have to go through cloudflare and can go directly to my reverse proxy. My TPlink Archer A7 that I use now can’t do NAT loopback and it makes any file transfers limited by my 5:1: asymmetrical upload speed. Also having VLANs for any cameras would be great, but I think you can do something similar via parental controls on an ASUS (restricting a certain device IP’s internet access.

Would the Asus rt-ax58u or a zenwifi XT8 have the festures that I would need for my simpleish home server?

Thanks for the help!

Edit: Tl;dr since nobody reads this long of a post:

  • I am running Ethernet (cat6) to every room. Modern laptops as well as phones have no Ethernet port, so I need wifi

  • I am looking at 1 wireless router, no “mesh” bs at all. The advice of overstuffing a small house full of a dozen access points is overkill and detrimental to performance without power and channel usage tuning.

  • I have specific features I want in a router, can one of the listed ones do all of that like NAT loopback?

  • @ostsjoeEnglish
    2•1 year ago

    If you have the ability to easily add wires, I would go with a system that allows you to wire everything together, rather than depending on a purely wifi mesh. Personally I’m running unifi ceiling mounted access points for this. They run on power over Ethernet, so you just need to get one cable to each. You can control them with their free software controller if you are into that, or something like their dream router.

    Run 3-4 of those access points placed throughout the house and you’ll never have a weak signal again.

    • JustEnoughDucksOPEnglish
      1•1 year ago

      The little advice that I have seen is “brick walls -> get a bunch of access points” but that doesn’t sit right with me.

      1. Currently we are using a Proximus (our ISP) modem/router in the northwest most far corner or the house and still get weak signal (enough for lower quality videos like Instagram reels) all the way in the southeast corner on the 2nd floor. It goes through 2 brick walls, a concrete floor, and a door and we can still use WiFi 6. Intuitively I would then set up something like an Asus rt-ax58u or a zenwifi XT8 mounted to the staircase wall or in the hallway in the center of the house. I don’t know if that would be strong enough to reach everything we need, but it seems better to me than a router in each corner and blasting channel noise at our neighbors’ houses since in belgium there isn’t much side-garden if any.

      4 access points would be chaos of overlapping channels, noise, devices never knowing which access point to connect to and choosing the worse one or WiFi on the phone/laptop completely freezing service until a reconnect, and blasting RF noise all over our neighbors’ houses.

      My mother already has thowe problems bad enough with one wireless router + 1 access point. That’s also why she sees 15 networks on a street of 20 houses far apart from each other.

      I think that 1 wireless router in the middle of the house would reach every corner, but I wanted to be somewhat sure before I drop 150-200€

      • @ostsjoeEnglish
        1•1 year ago

        Fortunately that’s not how it works when you have all the access points controlled centrally, like with unifi. Yes there is limited frequency space, but this is much less of an issue on 5ghz. There will also only be one ssid, and handoff between access points is pretty seamless.

        3-4 is probably overkill, but the attenuation situation sounded pretty dire. I run two in my house for redundancy mostly, just standard American stud and drywall construction.