Building out a high performance home network for our smart home

Hi. I’m currently in the market for a high-end Wi-Fi 7 mesh system.

At our house, we currently use an Xfinity ISP router as the core of the network, with TP-Link powerline adapters acting as Wi-Fi extenders to fill in the many dead zones around the house — and there are plenty of those, since the ISP router doesn’t reach far on its own.

This setup works fine and is pretty stable, but as soon as the network starts dealing with lots of small packets — like when Home Assistant is running with a ton of polling devices — it instantly falls apart. My mom and dad both work from home and need a rock-solid connection. On top of that, I want to set up Home Assistant and build a wild smart home. I’m a tech-savvy individual and love to tinker.

My home network must include:

• A beefy network core that can handle an extreme setup — the kind of setup that probably won’t ever happen, but I still want to plan for it. By “extreme,” I mean: two simultaneous 4K streams (one from an internal NAS and one from the Internet), two FaceTime calls, uploading and downloading files from both a local and remote NAS, cameras recording to a network NVR, a network TV antenna tuner streaming over a VPN (running on the router) and recording to a second NVR, a YouTube video playing, and an absolute deluge of smart home chatter — since most of our devices are Wi-Fi-based and we don’t plan to replace them anytime soon because they still work great and most are locally controlled anyway. This network must handle all of that without a single slowdown or dropout. If I check the network dashboard and see the router’s resources are being heavily used, that’s fine — but it shouldn’t translate into degraded performance. • Enterprise-grade Wi-Fi features at the core. I don’t need a full enterprise router and would prefer to keep to consumer systems if possible though I am willing to build out an entire enterprise grade system if those are the only ones that can suit my needs, but I do want to be able to tweak things like the DHCP pool range, assign DHCP reservations, create VLANs, set up dynamic DNS, and more. I probably won’t use half the features, but I want them there. • Tri-band Wi-Fi 7 coverage throughout the house. Our home was built in the 1950s with a block foundation that seriously attenuates Wi-Fi signals. The walls have metal mesh behind them, which doesn’t help either. The first floor is entirely surrounded by the block foundation, so getting Wi-Fi down there is especially hard. Structurally, the house is made up of two connected buildings that form one unified structure — they can’t be separated, but they look like two buildings placed side by side. The shorter section contains the second floor, and beneath that is a crawlspace. It’s a split-level layout. The crawlspace doesn’t need amazing coverage, but we may put two smart bulbs down there, so I’d like at least some Wi-Fi to reach it. This second floor is not surrounded by the block foundation, which makes it easier to reach with signal. The taller section contains the first and third floors. The current Wi-Fi router is on the third floor, since that’s where the internet enters the house. As far as I know, the only way to relocate the core router would be to run an Ethernet cable — although, in theory, it shouldn’t matter too much as long as I have an access point in the optimal location. I also need full tri-band Wi-Fi seven access on the first floor. • Backyard and shed coverage. Our backyard is about 24 feet wide by 60 feet deep. I want solid Wi-Fi coverage across the entire yard — at least two bars of signal everywhere, though three would be ideal. We also have a shed at the far end of the backyard with some Wi-Fi-based devices in it, so that needs to be covered too. Again, two bars of 2.4GHz Wi-Fi is acceptable in the shed, but three bars would be better. • Affordability and scalability. This system shouldn’t break the bank. I’ll most likely build it in stages rather than all at once. My budget for the initial phase — which includes the router and, if needed, one or two access points — is around $360 .

Can I have some assistance with building out this dream smart home network? Thanks in advance.