On the overkill side, but I just upgraded to a Ubiquiti unifi network. I set up a Unifi Dream Machine (UDM) Pro as the controller, but a standard UDM will work for most. The UDMP replaces my internet router, adds camera and doorbell support, and has some amazingly advanced security settings. Using it with NEXTDNS has eliminated 90% of all the adware / spyware traffic, so webpages are loading much faster. The big advantage is that you can mix and match base stations as needed, so you aren't hogtied to a specific technology, and it gave me the ability to wire what I could, where I could. It can do wired and wireless meshing, so I'm very happy. Not cheap, but worth every penny.
The greatest improvement to your Wi-Fi is getting unnecessary traffic off of it. Having networkable AV equipment hardwired means your can reduce the wireless traffic in a huge way.
Previously everything in my house was practically wireless, but I woke up one day and realized I had 80 devices getting IP addresses! The overhead of them simply connected to the wireless network was an impact, when being in an area where neighbors have Wi-Fi or mesh systems.
typical audio streaming connection looked like this
Phone/Computer>>wireless base station>>Receiver (>> = all wireless)
now, it's mostly this...
Phone/Computer>>wireless base station to gigabit network----Receiver
I have hardwired where I have AV or computer gear, and have cat 6/6a running under the house. I also ran it vertically near the air return to cover the upstairs.
I have gigabit Ethernet. My equipment states it does 1300AC wireless. At my router I typically see a line speed of 925-950 megabit. Due to interference, I connect Wi-Fi 5 regularly at 1100 megabit (maximum theoretical), but see around 600 megabit true. In comparison, a PS5 hardwired on the network consistently gets 875 megabit when the network is quiet, so you can see the relative difference.
Some notes:
Advertised speed vs real speed- the maximum connect speed is NOT your throughput speed. Speed test your router, vs your Wi-Fi and you will see that much of the gear out there will not get you line speed. The decent gear will have better performance, but read reviews and watch YouTube videos to find out what will perform at the level you want. Do not trust the marketing! Typically, you can expect speeds 60% of advertised, if your clients support that version of Wi-Fi and the capabilities of the network.
Stagger your placement. Place base stations for usage and coverage, meaning first floor on the left of the house, third floor in the middle and first floor in the right for coverage, but also position the base stations in the rooms with the greatest usage. You want to be near your base station, not 2 rooms over for maximum performance.
Split off your networks for performance. Run a 2.4 and 5GHz at a minimum. This allows you to put slower devices on the 2.4 and faster on the 5. Having one network slows down everything. 2.4 will typically have a greater signal reach than 5, power being equal, but 2.4 will also cap out on speed.
It's better to have more base stations configured with slightly less power and allow them to fail over, room to room. In some parts of my house, I only broadcast enough power to cover the room and the adjacent one. Why? Well, I have people using a lot of webex and zoom during the day and I don't want that traffic to impact music elsewhere, or be impacted by other traffic. In essence, I want people to use that specific base station when they are there, taking the traffic off ones further away. When every base station is pegged at 100% power you can actually generate performance degradations because the client is trying to negotiate the best performance from multiple base stations, and won't let go of the existing connection unless there is one with better signal. If everything is great, there is no failover and devices are not necessarily using the closest base station. Now multiply that by 50 to 100 devices and you can see all that checking is actually generating network overhead.
Wi-Fi 6 - it improves performance supporting multiple simultaneous conversations to the base station, in 2 ways. The tech behind this is OFDMA (Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access) and MU-MIMO (multi user multiple in, multiple out.). OFDMA splits a channel into smaller unique slices to efficiently use the channel for smaller conversations and MU-MIMO uses multiple spatial streams for larger bandwidth like 4k, gaming, streaming. So one allows smaller conversations to happen more efficiently in a single channel and the other uses multiple streams to effectively handle large conversations by spreading them out
Some of this only gives you improvement if you have Wi-Fi 6 gear, so let's cover that. Wi-Fi 5 and Wi-Fi 6 use the same channel space, so performance is achieved through greater efficiency of channel usage, with clients that can take advantage of that. I only have 6 client devices in the house that are Wi-Fi 6, so the need isn't great and with my setup I can upgrade base stations individually as I need to.
I honestly plan to skip Wi-Fi 6 and wait for Wi-Fi 6e. It uses 6 ghz channel space, without overlap, 8 channel MU-mimo, and many other additions that improve speed. Your Wi-Fi will be faster than your internet, even if you have gigabit. But the catch is... you will need new Wi-Fi 6e gear to use it!
Ok, so this probably gave you a lot more questions than answers, but hopefully it gets you thinking about what is says on the box vs what it will do in your home.
