Debugger

How to Build the Speedy Home Wi-Fi Network of Your Dreams

You might even have some fun while you’re at it

Owen Williams
OneZero
Published in
8 min readMar 11, 2020

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Photos courtesy of the author

EEven if you’re paying for decent internet, there’s always that one corner of the house where Netflix stutters and buffers. Solving this problem and getting the absolute best speeds throughout your home can’t be done with standard hardware. It requires building a custom network.

I came to this realization last year when I upgraded to a 1.5Gbps fiber connection. Fed up with the dead spots, I went down a rabbit hole in pursuit of the fastest, most reliable network I could build. Consumer-focused hardware such as Google Wifi and Eero don’t provide much control. Home mesh tools like Nest Wifi are designed to help plug holes in your Wi-Fi but aren’t generally focused on maximum speed and coverage. The best solution I found was Ubiquiti’s UniFi devices — business-grade network hardware that can be used at home.

I first heard about UniFi devices through Twitter, but what hooked me were the communities of passionate fans in places like Reddit’s /r/ubiquiti who post pictures of the fancy dashboards and elaborate home Wi-Fi setups they’ve built with the products. It wasn’t long after I started following these communities that I started plotting my own dream network. While there are other…

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Owen Williams
OneZero

Fascinated by how code and design is shaping the world. I write about the why behind tech news. Design Manager in Tech. https://twitter.com/ow