Whether you’re moving into a new home or are building your dream home, setting up a home network is a lot easier if you do it before moving everything in. A home network needs to have enough coverage for all of your devices around the house, while offering enough speed to continue to be useful as internet speeds and file sizes continue to improve. If the house is already built, or if you’re moving into an apartment, you’re going to have fewer options, but it will still pay off if you make the most of what you have.

4 How do you get the internet?

Where does the internet come into your home?

While things have gotten better as the internet has become an essential utility for many, a lot of people only have a couple of solid options for their internet connection. In the U.S. at least, it’s common to get your internet from a cable company using older coaxial cables run to and through the house. One benefit of this is that many rooms will have a connection option for your modem, allowing you to get set up in a fairly central location.

Fiber and fixed wireless access (FWA) connections may only come into the house at one point, so you’ll need to start there, and it’s not always the best location for an ideal connection spot. If your wiring is already installed, there’s a good chance your fiber connection is on an outside wall, which isn’t exactly ideal for Wi-Fi. If you still have time, get your fiber connection run to a central point in your home. If you place your router near the outside wall of your home, for example, you’re wasting a lot of your router’s power by dumping signal into insulated walls and over your front yard.

For similar reasons, you want to avoid setting up your main Wi-Fi network in a basement. Back when just a few megabits per second would do, setting up a router in the basement and using 2.4GHz Wi-Fi was acceptable, but with modern high-speed connection, large game downloads, and virtual meetings, this type of setup will struggle to keep up.

3 How much do you want to wire?

Faster speeds and lower ping with a wire

Wires are faster than Wi-Fi, and if you want the best connection possible across your house, it’s a good idea to run some across the house. Wi-Fi is better than an Ethernet cable in that you don’t need to be plugged in, and you'll have the freedom move around the house at will. But when it comes to throughput and consistency, an Ethernet cable will still come out on top. Consider where you want to set up things like your entertainment center, home office, and gaming PC, so you can get a dedicated wired connection, if possible.

Even if you plan to build a mesh network, setting up a wired backhaul can improve performance and even save you a bit of money in the setup. Mesh nodes need to have a connection back to the main router with the internet connection, which is called a backhaul. The speed of this connection determines the maximum speed you’ll ever get on that node. Many mesh nodes allow for a wired backhaul, which will improve speeds on clients connected to that node, and also better speed for the rest of your mesh, as less bandwidth will be needed for the backhaul.

2 How big is your home?

You may need more than one wireless access point

Speaking of mesh Wi-Fi networks, the equipment you need depends a lot on the size of your home. If your house is large or has multiple buildings like a detached garage, you might want a Wi-Fi setup with multiple wireless access points. If you’re a little more technical and don’t mind the planning and configuration aspect of setting up a network, you could start with a standalone router paired with multiple wireless access points (APs).

For a home, something like the Cloud Gateway Ultra from Ubiquiti with some compatible APs could be a good solution that’s easy to scale up as your needs increase with easy-to-use, yet powerful software. This also means you can upgrade pieces of your network over time rather than upgrading everything at once as a full, all-in-one router demands.

If this sounds like a bit too much work for you, fear not. You can get a full mesh system in a box with an easy app-based setup and minimal configuration. The best mesh systems, for example, offer plenty of speed for most people with quite a few options for getting connected.

Mesh kits can be expensive since they come with a lot more hardware than a single router, and since they need the power for a wireless backhaul they often need to be more powerful than a standard router would be. For example, while it has AX1800 dual-band speeds with a 5GHz band capable of 1201Mbps, Eero only advertises its Eero 6 mesh system as supporting internet speeds up to 500Mbps to account for the loss.

1 Is an off-the-shelf router good enough?

Custom routers are cool, but you probably don't need one

With modern high-end routers promising multi-gigabit speeds on wireless, plenty of wired capacity, and mesh expansion, many people’s home networking needs can be solved with a standard Wi-Fi router and not much more. If your home is compact enough to be covered by a single router, spending time and money running a bunch of wired and setting up multiple APs probably isn’t worth it.

A decently equipped modern router with Wi-Fi 6 or newer offers all the power that most people need. If you’ve got a large family, you can get something quick with AX6000 speeds, like the Asus RT-AX88U Pro. A router like this also supports 2.5Gbps Ethernet, which you’ll want if you have a lot of smart home devices or if you’re looking for high-speed access to a NAS.

Plan ahead with your hardware

Setting up a network can be a pain, especially if you’re running a lot of wires. The more complex your network is, the longer it takes to get everything set up. That’s why you’ll want to get hardware that not only works for today but will be good enough for the next few years, while you're putting all the effort into it. Most of the best Wi-Fi routers should be fine if you don’t need gigabit speeds, but if you’re looking forward to multi-gig internet speeds, a Wi-Fi 7 router with 6GHz support will help you make the most of it.

Similarly, while you don’t need to run around replacing all of your Cat5E cables with Cat6 or newer, if you’re running wired through the walls, you’ll thank yourself later for going with the newer standard. Ethernet cable types are even more important when you’re running them over long distances, as the quality of the signal can degrade with a longer run. Similarly, fiber options are also becoming more common in the home.

When you’re setting up your home network, you’ll want it to last as long as possible, but it’s also worth keeping in mind that the price of hardware will continue to fall, so if you don’t need multi-gig Wi-Fi speeds all over your home, you don’t need an ultra-fast Wi-Fi 7 mesh like the Eero Max 7 or TP-Link Deco BE85. It’s smart to install good bones, like Ethernet, but you don’t want to waste money on top tier hardware if you can’t yet put it to use.