HACKER Q&A
📣 wegs

How to set up home wireless for reliable WFH


I have a wifi network at home, with my cable provider's highest tier of service. I have a nice wifi routers. My cable provider sometimes has outages. As with many city homes, there are many overlapping networks, and I do run into wifi issues on the other end of the home.

I'd like reliable, robust internet. Ideally, I would have:

1) Cheap cable service and some kind of cheap backup services (e.g. DSL) as a seamless fallback

2) Some kind of mesh network which covered the whole home with reliable wifi

I am interested in having a secure router, which won't get compromised tomorrow, and which firewalls the house. I am uninterested in having a cloud router, which spies on me, and sends off my internal data to Google or some company in China.

Any recommendations on how to set something like this up?

I don't need a ton of bandwidth. I do need reliable ssh connections which stay up and have low latency.

  👤 bartvk Accepted Answer ✓
Just a question: you wouldn't happen to have coaxial cable in the house, right? If so, you could use an adapter to run ethernet over it: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B008C1JC4O/

I agree with the other poster, if you want reliability then there is no substitute for ethernet. Anything else will simply have lower reliability.

That said, I'd personally try HomePlug (ethernet over powerline) solution first. I was not able to get that stable and have tried two generations of the technology.

If it works -- fine, if not, I'd try mesh products like Eero next. They're owned by Amazon though, which I personally wouldn't like. I did hear some good reviews on the ATP.fm podcast, who usually are quite critical.

👤 pwg
> As with many city homes, there are many overlapping networks, and I do run into wifi issues on the other end of the home.

> I'd like reliable, robust internet.

>Any recommendations on how to set something like this up?

For at least the WiFi issues, the answer is: don't use WiFi. Use Ethernet cables and you will have reliable, robust connections. Which means (exclusive of a comcast outage) "reliable ssh connections which stay up and have low latency".

> I am interested in having a secure router,

Building your own from a PC, plural ethernet cards, and Linux is one way to know exactly what the router is, and is not, doing. It is also not going to become obsolete tomorrow because the maker no longer releases firmware upgrades for it. However you are also taking on the effort of upgrading things yourself as necessary to maintain security.