For wired, there is a 10gbit version of ethernet that is appropriate.

For wifi, you'll need to use something like 802.11ax, which 'on a good day' can give you 9.9gbit.(but suffers pretty severe attenuation from walls and obstacles/reflections)

But, all in all, it's doable.

As for 'how to get good speed / coverage' with .ax:

Use one hotspot per room.

REDUCE broadcast power, so that the bleed/reflection into nearby rooms is very minimal.

Place the hotspot up high, so that it radiates downward into the room. This reduces signal loss from obstruction in the room, like recliners, couches and such.

There may be issues with handoff with the above arrangement, but link integrity in individual rooms will be decent/good.

I would stay away from pfsense, seems like I had nothing but issues with it....it's a firewall there should be next to no issues.
Use Opnsense instead and make sure you get Zenarmor.

I also use mine virtualized with proxmox so I backup the VM as well as the Opnsense and ZenArmor configs seperately.
Also make sure you create a snapshot and a config backup before you do an upgrade or make changes.
If your firewall config requires a lot of changes from default and you don't go into the interface often you're in for some hurt trying to figure things out so document and take pics. They are pretty good about keeping the interface the same and not breaking anything when new functionality is added: ex: consolidating the firewall and DHCP which they did a couple of months ago.

DosFreak wrote on 2026-08-28, 18:29:

I would stay away from pfsense, seems like I had nothing but issues with it....it's a firewall there should be next to no issues […]
Show full quote

I would stay away from pfsense, seems like I had nothing but issues with it....it's a firewall there should be next to no issues.
Use Opnsense instead and make sure you get Zenarmor.

I also use mine virtualized with proxmox so I backup the VM as well as the Opnsense and ZenArmor configs seperately.
Also make sure you create a snapshot and a config backup before you do an upgrade or make changes.
If your firewall config requires a lot of changes from default and you don't go into the interface often you're in for some hurt trying to figure things out.

Uhm, wrong thread?

wierd_w wrote on 2026-08-28, 17:17:

Use one hotspot per room.

Haha yeah that's one way to do it. But that's much too built out of a system for what I can do right now.

DosFreak wrote on 2026-08-28, 18:29:

I would stay away from pfsense, seems like I had nothing but issues with it....it's a firewall there should be next to no issues […]
Show full quote

I would stay away from pfsense, seems like I had nothing but issues with it....it's a firewall there should be next to no issues.
Use Opnsense instead and make sure you get Zenarmor.

I also use mine virtualized with proxmox so I backup the VM as well as the Opnsense and ZenArmor configs seperately.
Also make sure you create a snapshot and a config backup before you do an upgrade or make changes.
If your firewall config requires a lot of changes from default and you don't go into the interface often you're in for some hurt trying to figure things out.

Interesting, what issues have you had with pfSense that you didn't have with Opnsense?

I've been planning on using proxmox as well, as I'd also like to experiment with a sandboxed VLAN for running web servers on it.

wierd_w wrote on 2026-08-28, 18:35:

Uhm, wrong thread?

Nope, right thread.

*shrug*

I get that doing it that way is $$CHA-CHING!$$, given those hotspots are around 100$/each...

But the fragility of the 5ghz band means you just *wont* get good results trying to blast signal from one AP through a whole house.

*shrug*

For me the top causes were:
Breakage on OS upgrades which should never happen with *nix or BSD right? but it happens way more often than Windows in my experience. This is why proxmox is critical.
Breakage on 3rd party plugins which would happen during pfsense updates which never happened with opnsense.
The above were likely due to not enough testing or care by Netgate since the CE ver is basically an afterthought of the paid version.'

The above are pretty critical since if your firewall goes down you have no Internet until you fix it or setup something temporary and if you have no Internet to look things up then it can be pretty rough.

Yeah distance is the main thing.

In my parents house I've had them on mesh for years with the eeros in the rooms they are mostly in.

Initially all they had was a phone line to a modem, then dsl with a wifi AP.
I then moved them to the first eero but for the longest time it was just eero communicating wirelessly to each other which worked well for their needs but obviously slowed things down.
About 2-3yrs ago when I ran ethernet in their house I also bought them a 2.5GB switch and then connected 3x eero 6e via moca 2.5gb (coax) and 1 of the eeros via ethernet.
So the 3x eero are all upstairs in a straight line running the length of the house.
The 1x eero is downstairs in the middle.

Right now doing a test from a bedroom via wifi from my laptop with a nvme ssd with the eero connected via ethernet that I'm about 6ft away from I'm getting 70+ MB/s upload and 95-100+ MB/s down (as reported by Windows taskmgr) via SMB to a QNAP NAS running 8x spinning rust RAIDZ2. You can try Wifi 7 but that seems like a waste of money to me.

/EDIT simplified above speed speed values

What problem does these insane speeds solve?

Assuming you want this for something like an IDE emulator, with NAS functionality, so the backing device for the ide emulation is the NAS.

Like say, a picoide deluxe (which has esp32 based wifi), OR, doing a custom rebuild of the core concept around a Pi4 off the gpio header, and using the pi4's native wifi, which is .ac

You'd need/want the wifi medium itself to be quite peppy for that.

Outside of retrocomputing, there's all the basic things you want a fast network for, given the increasingly bandwidth hungry nature of modern network applications.

Say, 4k streaming video, and doing it reliably, without the spouse or the kidlings complaining.

The case for an IDE device has not occurred to me, that can surely be interesting.

I also totally forgot about the existence of ultra high def vidyas. Anything over 720 is totally lost on me… surely I can “see” a difference but it is not a difference worth the rudeness inflicted upon the storage, transmission and decoding media according to my tastes 😀

I have 60Mbps fiber at home, which is insanely fast (when it works right) for what we have been able to do around here for a very long time. If I could choose to trade in the packet loss and unreliability for a 10Mbps line that works, I would.

I have a lot of network storage. 10gbps from my main PC to my server gets me significantly better access speeds to that storage. The better my WiFi is, the faster that storage is on my laptops and my phone as well.

As for my internet speed, having more than a gigabit comes in handy for my plans of running a web server at home.

st31276a wrote on 2026-08-30, 09:22:

What problem does these insane speeds solve?

It "solves" the problems of forced cloud connections, insane amounts of "telemetry," and ridiculously bloated software updates that were forced on you before you could even launch the program. Even then, no Internet connection is fast enough for what Microsoft wants to do with Windows (and has been doing for years, even in the last few years of Windows 10 before it went EOL).

Of course, those aren't problems that should exist at all, and getting faster Internet is just a band-aid "fix" for the growing enshittification of everything.

This was well said thank you.

I've started in on the custom router project.

On DosFreak's recommendation I used Opnsense instead of pfSense. I also decided to go bare metal with it, and put my Proxmox server on a separate machine. So far it is working very well. I'm even getting higher than advertised speeds: about 6000 mbps down and 8000 up despite only paying for 3000. Wondering if they signed me up for the wrong plan! I won't say anything about that unless they bill me for it.

As far as the WiFi goes, well, my Archer AX3000 is able to provide 1500mbps when sitting right next to it, and 1200 down / 800 up in the next room to my laptop with an Intel AX210 card, but not to my iPhone.

So yeah, it breaks the gigabit barrier, technically, if you're close enough to it. Not really enough for it to be particularly useful.

I suspect one way to get faster WiFi would be to upgrade from 2x2 MIMO to 4x4 MIMO on both my client and access point. Not sure if that AX3000 is true 4x4. I know the AX4400 is, but it only has gigabit WAN.

There are 802.11ax 4x4 mini PCIe cards available. I might try to get one or two and see what I can accomplish with them.

keenmaster486 wrote on 2026-09-17, 03:16:

I suspect one way to get faster WiFi would be to upgrade from 2x2 MIMO to 4x4 MIMO on both my client and access point. Not sure if that AX3000 is true 4x4. I know the AX4400 is, but it only has gigabit WAN.

I'm aiming at 2.5Gbps currently but the general idea is the same if you want to consider another approach. Instead of relying on access points talking one to the other wirelessly, you can use mesh nodes that support wired backhaul. They connect with cables to your LAN and they communicate through the wired network, you can even have a mixed configuration. The benefit is that every node gets full internet and lan speed without having to carefully place it somewhere in the middle, adjust power etc and serves wifi from that perfect starting point. My next purchase is going to be the Deco BE25s, but of course there are many similar products.

konc wrote on 2026-09-17, 11:31:

Instead of relying on access points talking one to the other wirelessly, you can use mesh nodes that support wired backhaul.

Yeah, something like that would solve the problem, but it's prohibitively expensive, plus I'm not in a position to wire my house with Ethernet at the moment, so the only wired devices are the ones in my office where the router is located.

Update on my WiFi experiments:

I purchased a TP-Link Archer AX6000 (AX80). This is a true 4x4 AP on both 5 GHz and 2.4 GHz, which helps with signal integrity further away from the router even though all my clients are 2x2. It also has a 2.5gbps WAN port, which lets me actually take advantage of the hopefully higher speeds.

Results: over 1gbps throughout the house - except in the basement (three level house, router is on the top level). It's doing about twice as well as the AX3000, and I am unable to determine how much better it is than the AX4400 because the AX4400 only has gigabit WAN.

Hard to believe, but 1.5gbps at my gaming PC in the living room. I was getting about 750mbps before.

Max speeds sitting right next to the router are topping out at 1900mbps down, 1500 up. Highest speed I have ever seen from a WiFi device in my own possession.

And before someone chimes in with this, I'm not much interested in 320MHz channel widths (802.11be). From what I've read it seems they're only useful within the same room. If I'm in the same room as the router, I'm using my desktop PC, which is wired in with 10gbps Ethernet! If it drops to 160MHz one room over anyway, why even bother? I'd have to upgrade every one of my clients anyway. Maybe in a few years I'll revisit that.

Honestly, this is my best result so far, and I'm not sure how much further I can push this using only a single router situated in a room on an upper corner of the house!

Unfortunately, I cannot find any 802.11ax 4x4 mini PCIe cards that do not have a massive heat sink stuck to them, so I will probably be unable to realize the full potential of this new access point until I do.

However, I'm pretty happy with this. To get >1gbps speeds out of WiFi throughout the house is honestly very impressive. 2.4 GHz gets me >100mbps consistently as well, so I essentially have the WiFi equivalent of 1000BASE-T and 100BASE-T at my disposal all over the house.