Network for New Construction

With the rise of remote work, smart home devices, and high-definition streaming, having a fast and reliable internet connection has never been more essential. This is especially true for large homes, where ensuring seamless Wi-Fi coverage across every room on every floor can be a real challenge.

Having more connected devices or a larger home doesn’t necessarily mean you need higher internet speed. However, it does mean that your home network’s design must be carefully planned to ensure reliable coverage for all your devices.

At SoundVision, we pride ourselves on building networks that ensure near 100% uptime and reliable wireless coverage everywhere you need it. Here are some of the design philosophies we use to ensure quality, high-speed internet throughout even the largest homes.

No matter how robust your home network is, your speed can only be as fast as what comes into your home. Internet service providers (ISP) like Xfinity or Sonic are responsible for bringing the internet into your home. The speed you choose to get from them will dictate the speed and quality of the internet throughout your home.

For example, if your home network is designed to support 1,000Mbps, you can’t expect those speeds in your home if your ISP plan only supports 50Mbps. If you’re unsure how much internet speed you should be paying for, check out this article about picking the right ISP plan to ensure you don’t overpay.

Large homes tend to have more devices: TVs in multiple rooms, desktop computers, security cameras, smart home gear and more. One great strategy is to provide hardwired internet for stationary devices, which alleviates the load on your wireless network.

For example, an access point can more easily provide fast and responsive internet speeds to a single device than when five other devices need to be online.

This is only effective if you also turn off Wi-Fi on hardwired devices. Even if a device is given hardwired internet, it rarely still needs Wi-Fi. This keeps the airwaves cleaner for wireless devices like smartphones and laptops.

If you’re providing hardwired internet to stationary devices, it would be smart to wire ethernet to other locations of your home while you’re at it. You may not need an internet connection there now, but you might in the future. It’s always easier to hardwire during remodels or new construction than to tear walls open in a furnished home.

Wireless access points (WAPs) are the backbone of your home’s Wi-Fi network, responsible for broadcasting a strong and stable signal. However, their coverage is limited, and everyday household elements like appliances, HVAC tubing, and thick walls can weaken their signal. In larger homes, multiple access points are often required to ensure seamless connectivity across all floors and outdoor spaces.

If you’re placing your own access points, a good rule of thumb is one access point for every 1,200 square feet. Never assume access points will provide strong coverage between floors. Just recognize that more access points is not better. There is such a thing as too many access points. The right amount is the perfect balance of coverage while accounting for the home's interferences.

Instead of placing access points based on square footage, the key to a strong and reliable network connection is seeing the layout of a space, preemptively determining where the home would naturally create interference, and designing around those obstacles. This is where an experienced integrator like SoundVision comes into play.

With over 20 years of experience designing home networks in the San Francisco Bay Area, we use advanced tools to map coverage, eliminate weak spots, and fine-tune placement to ensure seamless, high-performance Wi-Fi throughout your home.

All your access points should connect to the same network switch to ensure reliability and guarantee good performance. Running a single, uninterrupted ethernet cable between your access point and a network switch makes troubleshooting effortless and minimizes failure points. It would be frustrating if you had an access point not working properly and had to check wire splices behind drywall or chase down intermediary network switches.

Mesh networks can be tempting. They promise broad coverage and fast speeds without requiring a hardwired connection. However, mesh systems operate like Wi-Fi repeaters. Each time your internet has to hop from one mesh device to the next, the speed degrades. With enough meshes in a large home, you’ll see slow response times and slow network speeds. This is called latency and packet loss, with both contributing to a slow experience.

If hard wiring devices and access points aren’t possible, a mesh system may work for your environment. Just understand the trade-offs in terms of speed, latency, and reliability.

At SoundVision, we’ve spent more than 20 years refining our approach to home networking. We design your network to handle everything you’ll demand from it: remote work, 4K streaming and more. Whether it’s a 1,000 square-foot ADU or a 7,000 square-foot home, we can help design and install a home network that’s ready for anything you throw at it.

If you want a rock-solid network in your large home or are tired of Wi-Fi dead zones in your large home, give us a call at 415-456-7000 or send us a message. We’ll work with you to build a high-performance, future-proof solution for your San Francisco Bay Area home tailored to your needs.

We often joke that people need their internet more than water. You can live for three days without water, but many can't imagine their lives without the internet. To most people, an internet outage is an inconvenience. However, some of us need a connection available and ready for that critical moment when we really need it. For those people, the opportunity cost of an internet outage is too large. Thankfully, SoundVision has created a solution that ensures your internet connection will never rely on a single Internet Service Provider (ISP).

While living in the Bay Area offers a number of treasures, one of the major frustrations is the constant internet outages. Your home internet can go down for a number of reasons. Sometimes, it's due to ISP infrastructure. Creating a network for everyone requires a ton of specialized infrastructure throughout the Bay Area. While internet outages can happen for a variety of reasons, something as simple as heavy rain can affect your internet connection.

Sometimes you won’t even get a full outage. Instead, you'll get sporadic small outages or irregular slowdowns. You’re even more likely to experience issues when the weather gets worse.

While we can all accept that internet outages are out of our control, it doesn’t mean we have to be affected by them. SoundVision is now offering dual-ISP internet solutions. Our integration allows your home to seamlessly switch between two internet providers. There's no connection interruption or setting changes needed. This handoff happens automatically and goes completely unnoticed by anyone using the internet connection.

To emphasize how much this increases your uptime, let's say your current internet provider offers 99% uptime. That means your internet would be down for nearly 88 hours every year, or over seven hours every month. That’s nearly an entire work day worth of internet every month! However, if you add an additional second network that also has 99% uptime, your annual downtime would decrease to under three seconds a year.

Of course, this math isn’t directly translatable. Internet providers state they offer significantly more uptime, generally 99.9% or higher. However, if you’re reading along and feel this solution may be for you, then you understand the pain of losing an internet connection at the most crucial moment, even if it were to only go down three hours a year.

To minimize the chances of both your ISPs going down at the same time, we selectively pick two ISPs to provide internet to your home simultaneously. These ISPs are chosen strategically to ensure they don’t rely on the same infrastructure. For example, if you used AT&T and Xfinity as your two networks and neither of those connections were fiber, they would be very likely to both go down in a weather-related outage. Even having one connection being fiber isn’t a guarantee that your network will stay up.

We generally use one ground-based ISP, and another wireless ISP. A ground-based ISP would include Xfinity, Sonic and AT&T. They rely on copper or fiber. While these are prone to outages, they are a great primary ISP for their fast speeds and low latency. Meanwhile, wireless ISPs providers are largely unaffected by floods, weather, or other common ground-based infrastructure issues like traditional ISPs. They are 5G-based or even Satellite based. We commonly use Starlink, but Xfinity and Verizon are now offering 5G solutions for your home.

For those who need to have nearly 100% internet uptime, our dual ISP solution has been proven to safeguard your home internet connection against traditional outages. When designing your home network, we prioritize full coverage, reliability and ease of use. That means your network has no dead spots, always stays running and will seamlessly switch between ISPs on your behalf to ensure your home internet is always dependable. If you’re ready for the most reliable internet connection the Bay Area offers, call us at SoundVision at 415-456-7000 or send a message through our contact page.