Even the best mesh Wi-Fi system can be easily improved with a simple cable

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Once you've switched to mesh Wi-Fi, it's tough to go back. Standalone routers can get the job done and may actually be superior in some circumstances, namely if you want to shove all your smart home accessories over to the slower but far-reaching 2.4GHz band. A mesh system eliminates dead zones, however, and keeps speeds more consistent, which is often more important on a daily basis. A state-of-the-art smart home doesn't count for much if your phone or laptop can't get a decent signal in the basement.

To get the most out of mesh technology, you do have to learn certain principles. Chief among these is router placement — you want to maximize coverage without accidentally slowing things down or breaking the mesh entirely. If you stash a router in a closet or behind some other barrier hampering signals, you're sabotaging performance.

The best possible mesh experience requires integrating Ethernet. It's easy to understand why, although whether or not that's practical in your home may be another issue. Most people will, understandably, have to sacrifice maximum performance.

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All mesh systems require what's called a backhaul connection. This is the pipeline that shuffles data between routers, rather than directly to your devices. You don't have to do anything to set one up — by default, mesh products automatically establish a wireless backhaul.

There are a couple of potential problems with this, the first being an echo of what you'd deal with in a standalone router: diminished speed over distance. As signal falls, so do bitrates. The gap between routers can reduce performance by hundreds of megabits, and devices connecting to a mesh are automatically limited by the bandwidth of the closest node. The results should still be better than those of a standalone router, yet they remain less than optimal.

Worse, some cheaper mesh systems merge their wireless backhauls with the same bands your devices rely on, forcing both halves of the equation to suffer. This is why you should never buy a dual-band mesh product. For reference, anything with a dedicated backhaul link will at least be tri-band, and some more advanced options are quad-band.

Switching to an Ethernet backhaul is an instant fix for both of these concerns. Suddenly, it doesn't matter whether a product is dual-band. And in the distances of the average home, Ethernet won't lose you a meaningful amount of speed. It will probably deliver at least 1 Gbps, if not more, when you use a Cat 6 cable. Wi-Fi devices will likely only see a portion of this bandwidth, but at least they're not being kneecapped before they even connect.

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The massive hurdle here is stretching enough Ethernet cable across your home. Even apartment dwellers might need a few dozen feet, and the burden is only going to multiply in a two- or three-story house. The basic cost is trivial — you can buy a pair of 50-foot Cat 6 cables for around $30 — but most people don't like wires snaking across their floor. Trying to conceal everything can quickly become a serious project, so if Wi-Fi speeds are already snappy enough, a wired backhaul may not be worth the time, money or effort.

Then there's the question of compatibility. Every router has to have at least one free Ethernet port. While that's relatively common, you might want to dedicate some of those ports to other hardware, such as a laptop or a smart home hub. An Ethernet switch is an obvious workaround, though, once again, that raises the cost of the venture. 

You also need to verify that each port is fast enough. A 100 Mbps port is simply too slow, and even 1 Gbps can feel subpar if you've got a Wi-Fi 7 system with a dedicated wireless backhaul, as connecting Wi-Fi devices might be able to achieve multi-gig speeds. It's always preferable to use 2.5 or 10 Gbps Ethernet when it's available — but it might not be.