Home Networking near you

A slow connection is not always the provider's fault. The quick test is to compare performance standing beside the router with performance in the room that frustrates you: if the two are wildly different, the problem is inside the house and no change of plan will fix it. It is worth doing that test before spending anything, because the answer decides whether you need a network installer or a phone call to your provider.

When one router cannot cover a house, the options differ mainly in how the extra units get their signal back to the source. Extenders repeat what they hear over the air, which is simple and often disappointing, because a repeated weak signal is still weak and the arrangement can halve throughput. A mesh system is a set of units that present one network and hand devices between themselves as you move, which suits most homes and needs no new cabling.

The best results come from wiring the extra units. A mesh system whose units are linked by cable, or ceiling and wall access points fed by cable back to a central switch, keeps the wireless capacity free for your devices instead of spending it on carrying traffic between units. In a double-brick house, a two-storey home or anywhere with foil-backed sarking, that difference is usually decisive, and it is why installers push for cable when a roof space or a renovation makes it feasible. For a detached shed or studio, a cable or a dedicated point-to-point link between buildings will always beat hoping a mesh unit can shout through two external walls.

The router usually ends up wherever the connection was installed, which is frequently a corner of the garage, a hallway cupboard or behind a television in a cabinet. Those are among the worst possible positions. A survey measures signal strength in the rooms that matter and at the places fixed devices will live, including the front door for a doorbell and the eaves for cameras, then decides where equipment should go and whether a cable needs to run from the entry point to somewhere more central.

Placement rules are unglamorous and they work: put the main unit out in the open at about mid-height rather than in a cupboard or on the floor, keep it away from metal, mirrors, water tanks, the microwave and the switchboard, and space mesh units so each still receives a strong signal from the last rather than parking one in the dead spot itself. In a two-storey home, a unit on each level with a clear path up the stairwell does more than any amount of repositioning on one floor.

Finish with the equipment you will forget about. The modem, router, switch and any recorder need a location with air movement, since a sealed cupboard in a hot roof space or an uninsulated garage will shorten their lives through summer. Ask for everything to be labelled, for the network details to be written down and handed over, and for the administrator password on the router to be changed from whatever it shipped with and recorded somewhere you will find it again.

A cable is still the most reliable connection in any house, and the devices that benefit most are the fixed ones: the desk in the study, the television, a games console, a camera recorder and every access point. Where a renovation has the walls or ceilings open, running cable then is far cheaper and neater than fishing it through finished plaster later, so it is worth deciding on outlet positions while the builder is still on site.

Structured cabling brings every run back to one place, typically a small enclosure or a shelf in the garage, the laundry or a hallway cupboard, where the incoming connection, the router and a switch live together. Ask for more than one cable to the rooms that matter, a spare conduit or draw wire to the roof space for later, both ends of every cable labelled, and a tidy enclosure rather than a nest behind a cupboard door. Keep the central point out of direct sun and off the floor where water could reach it.

Two Australian details are easy to get wrong. Data cabling should be kept separate from mains wiring rather than bundled alongside it, and any penetration through a fire-separating wall or ceiling, such as the one between the house and an attached garage, has to be made good so the separation still does its job. And roof-space work in summer is done at dawn for a reason: a roof cavity on a hot day reaches temperatures that put installers at real risk, so expect early starts rather than a mid-afternoon crawl above the ceiling.

Network cabling and the small plug-in power supplies that feed routers and switches are low-voltage work and are handled by network installers. The rules about who may install fixed communications cabling, and what registration that requires, are set nationally and are worth asking your installer about directly: ask what registration they hold for the cabling itself, and get the answer before the work starts rather than after.

What is beyond argument is the mains side. Adding a powerpoint for a network enclosure, running a supply to an access point or a camera recorder, feeding a detached shed or studio, or doing anything at all at the switchboard is electrical work. Energy Safe Victoria's position is that there is no grey area and that unqualified electrical work is illegal as well as extremely dangerous. New South Wales requires an electrical licence or certificate before any electrical wiring work, regardless of the cost and regardless of whether the work is residential, commercial or industrial.

Western Australia states the same in its own terms: all electrical work must be carried out by a person who holds the relevant electrical licence, it is illegal for an unlicensed person to carry out electrical work including modifications to fixed wiring, and the electrical contractor must give you an electrical safety certificate within 28 days for work other than maintenance or a like-for-like replacement of equipment. In practice, ask any network quote to separate the cabling from the electrical work and to name who will carry out each part, especially where a detached building or an outdoor camera position is involved.

Summer is hard on network equipment in a way that catches people out. A router in a sealed cupboard, a switch in an uninsulated garage or a recorder in a roof space all run hot from December to February, and heat is the most common quiet cause of gear that becomes unreliable after a couple of seasons. Give the equipment air, keep it out of direct sun, and treat a device that only misbehaves on hot afternoons as a thermal problem rather than a mystery.

Storm season is the other stress test. A blackout takes the modem, the router and every wireless device with it, so cameras stop recording to the cloud, alarms lose their reporting path and nothing on the network responds until power returns. If the house relies on connected devices, ask about a small backup supply for the modem and router and be clear about how long it lasts. Where equipment is fed by a cable to an outbuilding, ask the installer how the run is protected at each end.

Two moments each year deserve a check. Before the summer holidays, confirm that remote access works, that the people you rely on can reach the cameras or alerts and that nothing important depends on a device that has been offline for months. Before winter, when the days shorten and everyone is indoors and online at once, is a sensible time to review whether the evening slowdown is the plan, the router or simply too many devices on the wireless that could be on cable instead.