Home Networking near you

Before paying anyone, work out whether the connection or the distribution is at fault. Compare what you get standing next to the router with what you get in the room that frustrates you. A large gap means the money belongs inside the house rather than in a faster package, and no upgrade to the line will fix it.

A cable still beats wireless for anything that does not move, and it is the honest fix for a house that Wi-Fi cannot cover. The difficulty is route-finding. Terraces and semis rarely have convenient service voids, so installers work with loft spaces, under suspended floors, through airing cupboards, along skirting in trunking, or externally in conduit and back in through a wall - each with a different amount of making good afterwards.

Decide where the equipment will live before deciding what to buy. The point where the line enters is often a hallway or a meter cupboard, which is the worst place for a router and a perfectly good place for a small shelf holding the incoming equipment, a switch and the ends of every cable run, with the wireless kit placed where people actually are. Ask for more than one cable to any room that matters, for both ends to be labelled, and for a spare route or conduit left in place while the walls are open.

The cabling itself is the easy part legally. Schedule 4 to the Building Regulations 2010 lists, among work needing no building notice, telephone wiring and extra-low voltage wiring for the purposes of communications, information technology, signalling, control and similar purposes. Structured data cabling sits squarely there, and nobody licenses the people who install it.

Powering the equipment is where it changes. A new socket for a network cabinet, a spur for an access point, an outdoor supply for a garden office or anything inside a consumer unit is fixed electrical work covered by Part P in England, whose requirement P1 calls for reasonable provision in the design and installation of electrical installations to protect people operating, maintaining or altering them from fire or injury. Regulation 12(6A) makes work notifiable where it involves a new circuit, a consumer unit replacement or an addition or alteration in a special location; an installer registered with one of the electrical competent person schemes listed by gov.uk, such as BESCA, Blue Flame Certification, Certsure trading as NICEIC, NAPIT or OFTEC, can self-certify it rather than going through building control.

Check which nation's rules you are under before you take any of that as read. Regulation 12 and Schedule 4 now carry separate England and Wales versions; Scotland applies its own standard 4.5, which requires that a building's electrical installation neither threatens the health and safety of people in and around it nor becomes a source of fire; and Northern Ireland's Building Regulations 2012 use different lettering altogether, with Part P covering sanitary appliances rather than electrics.

Cable routes go exactly where asbestos was used. HSE's position is that asbestos was used in many industries and buildings until it was banned in 1999, that buildings constructed after 2000 are unlikely to contain it, and that people working in certain trades are more likely to come across it when working on buildings that date from before 2000, with drilling among the activities that create the risk.

The materials HSE describes read like a list of cabling routes: asbestos insulating board in internal partition walls and in bulkheads above ceilings, in ceiling tiles, in panelling around windows and in external soffits; loose asbestos insulation between cavity walls, under floorboards and in loft spaces; and thermal insulation around pipework. Drilling a hole into asbestos insulating board is work that needs training even when it is not licensable, which tells you it is not something to improvise around.

So make it a question at the quotation stage rather than a discovery on the day: what year was the property built, what is the proposed route made of, and what happens if nobody is sure. In a pre-2000 home, the right answer is that work stops until the material is identified by someone competent to do it.

The router is the one device every other device depends on, and it is usually the least maintained thing in the house. The NCSC's guidance on smart cameras is blunt about the common failure - equipment shipped with a default password set by the manufacturer that is often well-known or guessable - and its remedy applies to every box on the shelf: change it to a secure one, for example by combining three random words you will remember.

All three approaches extend coverage; they differ in how the extra units get their signal back to the router, and that difference is what decides the result in a house with thick walls. Wireless mesh is quick to deploy and needs no cable, but every unit still has to hear the one before it through the same walls that caused the problem. The same units linked by cable behave far better, because the wireless is then only doing the last few metres to your phone.

As a rough guide: a flat or a small terrace is usually fine on one well-placed router; a three-storey house, a stone cottage or anything with a rear extension tends to need a unit per floor or per zone; a garden room or detached garage wants cable, or an outdoor-rated link, rather than hope. Adapters that carry the network over mains or aerial cable are a reasonable fallback where cable is impossible, but they should be tested in your house before anyone charges for a design built around them.

The survey is the job. Expect the installer to measure signal in the rooms that matter rather than in the hall, to look in the loft and under a floor, to ask how many devices the house actually runs, and to identify where cable can physically go before promising anything. A quotation produced over the phone is a price for equipment, not a plan for your building.

Agree the finish as well as the function. Where cable will be surface-run and in what, what making good is included, whether the loft insulation goes back properly, and what documentation you get at the end - a labelled diagram of what runs where is worth more in five years than any part of the hardware. Ask for the network's administrator credentials to be yours, and for any installer remote access to be removable.

LokalMatch is the introduction and nothing else. You describe the property, the rooms that fail and whether cable can be run, once, with your postcode, and network installers covering your area contact you directly; the pros pay for the requests they receive. LokalMatch does not survey, install or support networks, does not set prices, and does not vet, rank or recommend anyone who gets in touch - so use the survey questions above to tell them apart.