Mesh, extenders, powerline
Mesh wifi not working? It was never going to.
A mesh, an extender and a pair of powerline adapters all end up doing the same thing: sending your connection through the air and through brick to the room you're in. The walls don't get thinner because the box cost more.
What you've spent
The expensive fix loses to the same physics as the cheap one
Everything in grey is still wifi. Wifi is the thing failing you.
Wifi extender
£40–£90Halves the speed of whatever it extends
Powerline adapters
£60–£120Needs both ends on one ring circuit. Usually they are not
Three-node mesh
£400–£600Nest, Deco, Orbi. Still did not fix the back bedroom
UniFi, properly specified
£400–£700Genuinely better kit. Same brick, same tile, same distance
Cabled. Two rooms, everything included.
£650–£950Not wifi. Nothing to rent, no contract, no firmware to go wrong. Still working in ten years.
We're not against UniFi. It's excellent, and once there's a cable to the far end of the house it's the right thing to hang off it. The argument is the order: cable first, then decide whether you need to spend anything more at all.
Who notices most
Calls and games, not films
You work from home
Teams drops mid-sentence. Always the same room. You've apologised for your connection so often it's become a personality trait.
You game
It was never bandwidth. It's jitter. The spike that lands exactly when you're holding a site, and you die to someone with a wire.
A film buffers ahead and hides a bad connection. A call or a game can't, which is why that's where you notice it.
What does fix it
A wire. Round the outside.
We run weatherproof network cable up the outside wall to the room you work in. Two pencil-width sealed holes, no floorboards up, usually done in a day. Two rooms, all in, £650 to £950.