Gear
What to buy, and what not to.
Most home-network spending goes to the wrong thing — a faster plan when the bottleneck is indoors, a mesh kit when the router is in a cupboard, three nodes where two would do better. These pages are about the judgement, not the listings.
We publish no prices, no star ratings and no review counts, because we have no licensed source for them and will not print a number we cannot stand behind. Current price and availability live on Amazon, where they are authoritative. What lives here is the part Amazon cannot tell you: whether you need the thing at all.
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Coverage
Mesh Wi-Fi systems
What a mesh system actually solves, why backhaul is the specification that matters, and how to tell whether you need one or just a better-placed router.
Core hardware
Wi-Fi routers
How to read router specifications honestly — which numbers describe real capability, which are marketing arithmetic, and when replacing the router is genuinely the fix.
Buy vs rent
Cable modems
The arithmetic behind buying a modem instead of renting one, and the compatibility and support trade-offs that decide whether it is worth doing.
Backhaul
Wired backhaul
Why wiring the stationary devices is the highest-return change in most homes, and the three ways to do it when pulling new cable is not an option.
Before you buy anything
Ten minutes of measurement prevents most of the regret. Test wired and wireless separately and you will know whether the problem is the service you pay for or the network inside your walls — they have completely different fixes, and only one of them is a purchase.
Find the real bottleneck first →