A Wi-Fi Dilemma (Premium)

It’s past time to upgrade my aging Wi-Fi 5 mesh network to something more modern, but I’ve come down with a predictable case of decision paralysis.

The underlying issue is that we live in a very large house. It’s about 2500 square feet not counting the basement, but since the basement has been finished as a living space with a very large bedroom, an office, and a 3/4 bath, we must count that too. And when we do, the size of the home balloons to about 3600 square feet. And, in case it’s not obvious, it consists of three floors. And is old enough---it dates back to the very early 1980s---that it’s well-made internally and is thus problematic for Wi-Fi.

The solution to this problem, when we moved in here in 2017, was to go with a Mesh wireless networking system. I chose Google WiFi, which is based on the then-current Wi-Fi 5 standard, and started with a three-node setup. It has always worked very well, and I still like its ease of use and drama-free experience, though I have taken big steps back from the Google smart home ecosystem overall.

But I have had a few issues. The biggest was with my ever-growing collection of Sonos gear: Once we got two Sonos Play:5 speakers and a Sonos Sub, I started experiencing connectivity issues with those speakers because they’re in the sunroom, which is far from any of the Wi-Fi nodes as you could get in the house, and because Sonos doesn’t play nice with mesh networks that don’t allow you to dedicate a specific channel to this hardware. I did everything you can do, including wiring some of the Sonos devices near the router, which is supposed to move them onto a separate SonosNet network, adding a fourth Google WiFi node in the kitchen, which is close to the sunroom, and buying a Sonos Boost (and wiring it to the Google WiFi node in the kitchen), to make this work more reliably.

And it worked … until it didn’t.

Sometime this past summer, I couldn’t access the Sonos equipment in the sunroom (and basement, interestingly), and after a lot of troubleshooting, I finally realized that if I just removed the Sonos Boost, it would all work. Sigh. So I was back to the previous, less reliable configuration. It’s mostly worked OK since then, and I’ve only done some basic troubleshooting to see if the Boost is actually OK to use. But I’ve long felt that a more powerful and modern Wi-Fi network might help solve this problem. As would going with a Wi-Fi provider that let me dedicate a channel to Sonos (so, not Google equipment).

And that’s not all that’s changed in the past five years. Between my 2017 purchase of the Google WiFi setup and today, Wi-Fi has evolved with Wi-Fi 6 and Wi-Fi 6E releases. Wi-Fi 6 is a dramatic improvement over Wi-Fi 5, with about a 40 percent overall performance advantage, improved network traffic management functionality, support for more simultaneous connected devices, and improved security via its support for WPA3. But Wi-Fi 6E---which should ha...