Wi-Fi with no dead
spots.

It depends on how many floor slabs are in the way and how the home is laid out, not on the square metres. A long single-storey house may need fewer nodes than a small maisonette, because what eats up the signal is passing through concrete and load-bearing walls, not the horizontal distance it covers. So there's no fixed number that works for every house: what there is, though, is a method, which is to measure the real signal at every point in the home before buying anything. An on-site survey, with the router in its final position, settles the question quickly and avoids two common mistakes: buying too much "just in case", or falling short and having to extend the network a few months later, which usually costs more than planning it properly from the start. You can see how it's worked out in how many mesh Wi-Fi nodes your home needs.

A repeater amplifies the signal it receives and almost always creates a second network with a different name, so your phone doesn't choose which one to join by itself and you have to switch manually when you go up or down a floor. It also splits its bandwidth between what it receives from the router and what it sends to your devices, so every hop loses some speed. To fill in one odd corner where you only need a basic connection, it can be enough, and cheap. For a whole house over several floors, with work video calls and streaming in several rooms at once, the difference shows: a mesh network coordinates several points under a single network name, and your device moves between nodes without interrupting what you're doing. The key to getting real performance out of it is how those nodes connect to each other, which is why it's worth first understanding why your Wi-Fi is slow before deciding how many units to buy.

Not always, and it's one of the first things we check before giving a fixed quote. Many homes, especially those that already have a TV aerial or phone installation, have empty or half-empty conduits that can be used to run a new network cable without touching a single tile. If those conduits don't reach where the node needs to go, the alternative is usually neat surface cabling, in trunking or a cable-carrying skirting board, rather than chasing out walls, which is the most expensive option and the most disruptive to live with while the work is going on. There's also the fully wireless option, with the nodes talking to each other over Wi-Fi, which performs slightly less well but doesn't touch a single brick. What we always do is look at the home before quoting: we tell you clearly whether it needs building work, surface cabling or a wireless solution, and the quote reflects that reality, not a guess made from outside without ever setting foot in the house.

No, and it's worth knowing that before spending on equipment that won't solve the problem. A mesh network distributes around the house the signal that comes in through the door: if that incoming connection is good, mesh carries it to every room with barely any loss of speed; if what comes in is already poor, it will stay poor however many nodes you add. They are two different problems that are best diagnosed separately, because mixing them up leads to buying extra kit without fixing anything. To find out which one you have, the first step is to measure the real speed reaching the router, compared with what you're paying for, not what your phone shows at the far end of the house. If the problem lies in the contract or the fibre installation, that's where it needs fixing; if the fibre comes in fine and the only problem is spreading it around, then investing in mesh does make sense. You can read about it in detail in what internet speed you really need.

There's no single answer, because it depends on three things that vary from home to home: how many nodes need installing, whether new cable has to be run or existing conduits can be used, and whether the set-up includes extras such as parental controls or a separate guest network. A purely wireless installation, with no additional cabling, is the quickest because it's just a matter of placing the nodes and configuring the network. Once cabling comes into it, the time depends mainly on whether new cable has to be run or existing conduits can simply be reused, which is much quicker. This becomes clear on the first visit, when we survey the home and decide where each node goes: at that point we already know whether the job can be done in a single day or needs longer, and that estimate is part of the fixed quote you receive before we start, not a generic figure given over the phone without having seen the house.

Yes, and in large houses that's often how it's done: the essentials are covered first and a node is added later if a dead spot turns up, for example an annexe, a detached garage or part of the garden that wasn't considered in the original plan. For extending to be simple, the system chosen at the outset has to be scalable: it must let you add nodes from the same manufacturer without redoing the whole configuration or switching apps. That's why it's worth choosing the starting system carefully even if the initial installation is small, because changing brand halfway through really does mean starting from scratch. If your home has areas used only occasionally, such as a floor that's currently empty or a garden used only in summer, it's worth telling us from the start so that extension can be planned in. See your provider's router or your own if you're also thinking of replacing the main router when you extend the network.