1. Future proof 2. Multi level home ( around 3000 sq ft ) 3. Can support many many devices ( have a ton of stuff due to all the smart home stuff ) i have a bridge but still 4 Both wife and I work from home and could be on zoom at once, along with more 4K videos being streamed on other devices. 5. We have Verizon fios gigabit connection. 6. We have a lot of content on an external drive and would prefer to have that be available as network drive.
Can provide more details if necessary.
Good coverage is a matter of having more access points. Most off the shelf mesh systems will do fine.
Personally I enjoy systems that actually leave me empowered & knowing what is going on, but A) running OpenWRT & DAWN (to bandsteer clients) is not that easy and B) the available hardware has been absolutely miserable in the past couple of years, with 802.11ax only barely becoming available. My roommates had a second Google Mesh wifi router system & it worked flawlessly, without any of the pain & suffering, & had good visibility. However it lacks the USB NAS capability. Honestly I think most systems would serve you fine & your requirements are unspecial & uninteresting: you'll have a fine time with any vaguely competent mesh system. Especially if it has 3+ nodes.
When you don't run any ethernet cabling, mesh network device placement is critical because the back-haul needs to get an adequate signal to the originating device as well as provide good coverage for its area. The construction materials of the home have a big impact upon what works and what doesn't.
The seeming truth of the matter is that most wifi devices just have terrible radio gear. The mesh units said they only had so-so signal in my house, but they just had so very much better radios. I don't think we had a single client device anywhere would ever dip below 300mbps if it's radio could get that high. The backhauls for most mesh gear are incredibly good. I would put away your fear, in most cases. These products work incredibly good. Sometimes you may indeed need to add one more node to make all your problems go away - to make the hops physically shorter, to give the backhauls shorter/lower-interference links - but that's much much easier than dropping ethernet, is such an easy chore to deal with. Any potential problem can be solved by adding more nodes, creating a denser / less long distance mesh.
If you really demand on gigabit (really, post-gigabit; mesh can definitely do gigabit) everywhere, yes, you may need to raise your spend a lot, and use 2.5Gbit ethernet APs that can bandsteer among themsleves. Frankly I think this is kind of a suckers game for 99.99% of people. The mesh products are amazing. Their latency & responsiveness is incredibly good, the bandwidth far more than adequate. Many have very reasonable costs, where-as most multi-AP solutions cost unreasonably more for no reason other than market-segmentation-exploitation.
Ideally the WAN access is not "at one end" of the mesh, but even if it is, I think it'll probably be solid for most folks in most circumstances.
My personal / recommended setup:
- For firewall: pfSense (or OPNsense, if you prefer a truly open alternative)
- For L2/L3 switching: Ubiquiti Switch, with PoE
- For WiFi access points: as many Ubiquiti Access Points as needed (I use FlexHD; easy installation if you already have the cabling, but there are other alternatives, including ceiling mounts, APs for outdoors, etc). I use a dedicated UniFi CloudKey, but you can also use a Docker container or your own vm
IMO this gives you the perfect balance between flexibility and control, without requiring too much maintenance. While I'm frustrated with some recent political crap from Ubiquiti [1], the wifi is rock solid, and the products are top notch.
Your fios connection shouldn't be the problem. But WiFi, being RF, can often be a limiting factor.
