My home network hasn't always used quality networking equipment. For many years, I used whatever the ISP provided as my only network appliance, since I didn't need anything beyond Wi-Fi and a few wired ports. Then I found out about custom router firmware like DD-WRT, and I upgraded to the legendary WRT54G, and spent no time at all flashing it with Tomato.

I thought I was doing the best thing for my home network: a quality Wi-Fi router and the best custom firmware at the time. Smart home tech hadn't really taken off, and all I needed connectivity for was a few laptops and cellphones, along with one hardwired PC. My ISP plan barely qualified as broadband, and I made a bunch of assumptions about my home network and the ISP connection that hid how broken my network actually was.

I thought my home network was just fine

Honestly, I put most of the issues down to my aging laptop

When I lived in the UK, I expected my home network to be terrible. Brick buildings, lots of pre-war metal water pipes, and other construction methods that are not conducive to Wi-Fi penetration meant I had to hardwire devices in the next room from the router. But I assumed American apartment walls would be better. After all, I could hear what my neighbors were doing, so the walls couldn't be that absorbing.

I had the cheapest cable internet plan, which was either 25 or 50 Mbps, a Wi-Fi router that was supposedly capable of handling that, and none of my devices really had fast Wi-Fi. I thought I had my home network nailed, with client devices that matched the broadcaster, an ISP plan that was sufficient for my needs, and hard-wired the few devices I had that needed Ethernet.

I had a firewall and Quality of Service, so I thought I was good to go

My router had a functional firewall, and since I'd flashed custom firmware, I had Quality of Service (QoS) to try to ensure fair bandwidth use by devices and apps on the network. This was when QoS was established for enterprise use, but hadn't really made it to consumer devices, so I thought I was ahead of the curve.

Then I upgraded to Gigabit fiber, and the cracks started to show

Upgrades are supposed to improve things, right?

I remember it wasn't that long after the ISP technician left after installing the new router and whatever else he did to upgrade things to Gigabit when I started noticing issues. They were intermittent, sometimes dropping to half speed, and sometimes to what seemed like slower than the old plan, before going back up to full speed. I put it down to teething issues, and didn't really pay that much attention to the speeds for a while.

Most of my devices were Wi-Fi only, but I had a new router, so that couldn't be the issue, right? And it was intermittent, even on wired connections, so I chalked it up to neighborhood network congestion or something beyond my control. Maybe it was even my ISP throttling the connection, which was far more common back then.

Never trust your existing wiring

The physical layer of your home network is often the source of many intermittent issues, making troubleshooting a chore. My apartment had both coaxial and, according to the listing, Ethernet cabling through the walls, and the wall jacks were all for 8P8C instead of the smaller phone jacks, so I assumed those connections had been done correctly and would provide the connections I needed.

When I had cable internet, the coax was fine since my plan was only 50Mbps. I didn't find out until upgrading to Gigabit that the cable was poorly run, had splitters everywhere, was damaged in a few sections, and also every connector wasn't appropriately terminated, so the sheathing wasn't grounded properly. Safe to say, it wasn't able to pass the service I was paying for, and needed replacing.

Then I got fiber, and had the ISP provision the Ethernet ports on the ONT, so I didn't have to worry about coaxial. I soon found out that the "wired for Ethernet" connections in my walls were reusing the old telephone wires from when the apartment had a phone in every room. That was barely enough to reach 100 Mbps, let alone ten times that.

I learned a hard lesson from both of these wiring schemes, and that's to never trust the existing wiring. Heck, I don't trust the cables I've put in if there's a problem with my network, and it's the first thing I'll check with a cable tester.

Wiring was only part of the problem

Even after the wiring was replaced, I still had intermittent issues, but they were less frequent, and I thought I just needed to lower my expectations slightly. After all, it could have been wireless signal congestion from the dozens of apartments within Wi-Fi range, issues with my client devices that needed a firmware update to fix, or any number of other things I couldn't really do much about.

But a few devices were silently destroying my home network. Thankfully, the microwave wasn't one of them, but the baby monitor was, as was the number of Bluetooth devices in my living room. After switching from a radio-based baby monitor to a Wi-Fi one, most of the issues went away, and I remembered to turn off Bluetooth on devices I wasn't actively using.

Network issues can fail silently, and you might never know

You can do everything according to best practices, and still have your home network silently break and start giving you headaches. I've had issues after running new CAT6 cables because it snagged the nails on the carpet stays and broke a conductor, firmware issues on routers making the WAN - LAN connection limited to half the Gigabit it should have been, and overburdened Wi-Fi routers with too many smart devices connected at once, to mention a few more that I didn't mention earlier.

It's important to know what to troubleshoot, and also the order you should do things in (physical connections first, then Wi-Fi devices one by one, etc) so that you stand a good chance of figuring out which thing(s) is causing your home network to have issues.