Rule 5: Above head height, please
The higher you can mount your access points, the better. A single human body provides roughly as much signall attenuation as an interior wall—which is part of the reason you might notice Wi-Fi at your house getting frustratingly slower or flakier than usual when many friends are over for a party.
Mounting access points—or a single router—above head height means you can avoid the need to transmit through all those pesky, signal-attenuating meat sacks. It also avoids most large furniture and appliances such as couches, tables, stoves, and bookcases.
The absoluteideal mounting is in the dead center of the room, on the ceiling. But if you can't manage that, don't worry—on top of a tall bookshelf is nearly as good, particularly if you expect the access point in question to service both the room it's in, and the room on the other side of the wall its bookshelf or cabinet is placed against.
Rule 6: Cut distances in halves
Let's say you've got some devices that are too far away from the nearest access point to get a good connection. You're lucky enough to have purchased an expandable system—or you're setting up a new multiple-access point mesh kit, and still have one left—so where do you put it?
We've seen people dither over this, and wonder if they should put an extra access point closer to the first access point (which it has to get data from) or closer to the farthest devices (which it has to get data to). The answer, generally, is neither: you put the new AP dead in the middle between its nearest upstream AP, and the farthest clients you expect it to service.
The key here is that you're trying to conserve airtime, by having the best possible connection both between your far-away devices and the new AP,and between the new AP and the closest one to it upstream. Typically, you don't want to favor either side. However, don't forget Rule 1: two rooms, two walls. If you can't split the difference evenly between the farthest clients and the upstream AP without violating Rule 1, then just place it as far away as Rule 1 allows.
If this all seems too logical and straightforward, don't worry, there's another irritating "unless-if" to consider: some higher-end mesh kits, such as Netgear's Orbi RBK-50/RBK-53 or Plume's Superpods, have an extremely high-bandwidth 4x4 backhaul connection. Because this connection is much faster than the 2x2 or 3x3 connections client devices can utilize, it might be worth settling for lower signal quality between these units, with a degraded throughput that's still close to the best your client devices can manage.
If your mesh kit offers these very fast backhaul connections,and you absolutely cannot introduce any more APs to the mix, youmight actually end up better off putting your last AP closer to the clients than to its upstream. But you'll need to experiment, and pay attention to your results.
Wi-Fi is fun, isn't it?
Rule 7: Route around obstacles
If you've got a really pesky space to work with, there may be areas that you just plain can't penetrate directly. For example, our test house has a concrete slab and several feet of packed earth obstructing the line-of-sight between the router closet and the downstairs floor. We've seen small businesses similarly frustrated at the inability to get Wi-Fi in the front of the office when the back was fine—which turned out to be due to a bookshelf full of engineering tomes lining a hallway, resulting in several linearmeters of tightly-packed pulped wood attenuating the signal.
In each of these cases, the answer is to route around the obstruction with multiple access points. If you've got a Wi-Fi mesh kit, use it to your advantage to bounce signals around obstructions: get a clear line of sight to one side of your obstacle, and place an access point there which can relay from another angle that reaches behind the obstacle without needing to go directly through it.
With enough APs and careful enough placement, this may even tame early-1900s construction chickenwire-and-lath walls—we've seen people successfully place access points with clear lines of sight to one another through doorways and down halls, when penetrating the walls themselves is a job better suited to a hammer-drill than a Wi-Fi device.
If you've got too many obstacles to successfully route around, over, or under... see rule eight.
