The mesh WiFi vs access points debate is the question I get asked more than any other on a domestic call-out, and the honest answer rarely matches what the box at the high-street retailer tells you. Both technologies work. Both are sold heavily. Both have a place. But for the vast majority of London properties I see, the right answer is the one that takes thirty seconds longer to install and lasts a decade — wired access points, fed by Cat6, powered by PoE. The mesh-only kit has its niche, and it is a smaller niche than the marketing suggests. Here is the comparison as I actually run it through with customers on site, with no brand loyalty and no upsell.

The honest definitions

Before we compare, let's nail down what each thing actually is, because the words get used loosely.

Mesh WiFi is a system of two or more radio units (usually called nodes or satellites) that talk to each other wirelessly, with one of them connected to your modem/router as the entry point. The nodes form a self-organising mesh so a device walking through the property hands off between them under a single network name. The defining feature of mesh — the one nobody advertising it likes to dwell on — is that the link between the nodes is itself a WiFi link. That link is called the backhaul. If the backhaul is wireless, every byte going to a satellite node travels over the radio twice: once from the satellite to the device, and once from the satellite back to the parent. That has consequences we will come to.

Wired access points are individual WiFi radios, each one connected by an ethernet cable back to a central switch or router. The backhaul is the cable. Each AP is independent, full-strength, with the full available radio bandwidth going to its clients. They can be configured as one network (so devices roam between them seamlessly) or as separate networks if you want segregation. The gold-standard version uses Power over Ethernet so the same Cat6 cable that carries the data also carries the power — no separate plug needed at each AP.

Wired-backhaul mesh is the middle ground. The same consumer mesh kit, but with an ethernet cable run between the nodes so they no longer have to talk to each other wirelessly. This is the configuration most people don't realise they can use, and it is often the right answer when someone has already bought the mesh kit and the building can take a cable.

Why the consumer mesh marketing is misleading

The box for a typical consumer mesh kit will quote a headline number — "AX5400" or "BE9300" or whatever this season's figure happens to be. That number is the sum of all the radios in the unit, in theory, in a vacuum, with no walls and no other traffic. It is a marketing maximum, not a real-world throughput. Two specific issues you need to know about:

  1. Wireless backhaul halves your throughput. If the satellite is using its only 5 GHz radio to both serve clients and talk to the parent, every packet has to traverse the radio twice. In practice you lose around 50% of your throughput compared to the parent node. That is not a flaw in any particular brand. It is physics of half-duplex shared-medium radio.
  2. Tri-band mesh helps but does not solve it. Premium mesh kits add a second 5 GHz radio dedicated to backhaul. That dedicated radio recovers most of the lost throughput — provided the path between the units is clear and short. Two solid brick walls between nodes will hammer that dedicated backhaul just like any other 5 GHz signal. Tri-band mesh in a Victorian terrace is often still working at half rate by the second satellite.

I am not saying mesh is bad. I am saying the rated speed on the box is not what you will get in a London flat with three rooms between the nodes.

When mesh is the right call

Mesh has a real niche and I install it cheerfully when the niche fits. The defining condition is: you cannot pull cable. That happens in two main scenarios.

Rental properties

You don't own it. The landlord won't let you drill through walls, run trunking, or punch a hole into the loft. The fabric of the building is off-limits to you. In that case mesh is genuinely the right answer — you place a couple of nodes in well-chosen positions, you cover the flat as well as the building permits, and when you move out you put the nodes in a box and take them with you. No restoration, no awkward conversations at the end of the tenancy, no rejected deposit.

Small flats with no cable routes

Some flats — particularly post-war conversions where the cabling chases were plastered in decades ago and the walls are solid concrete — genuinely have no sensible route for new ethernet. A long external cable run that climbs three storeys up a brick face just to get to a back bedroom is not a good answer. If the flat is small enough that two well-placed mesh nodes will cover it, mesh is the pragmatic call. We are talking one-bedroom and small two-bedroom flats in the sub-65-square-metre range.

When wired access points are the right call

The flip side. If any of these are true, wired wins — and it is not close.

  • You own the property. Cabling is a one-time investment that survives every router refresh for the next twenty years. Pulling a couple of Cat6 drops while you have the walls open is the cheapest infrastructure decision you will ever make.
  • The property is on more than one floor. Mesh degrades faster going vertically than horizontally because most signals travel sideways through walls but have to go through dense floor joists and concrete slabs to go up or down. Houses with two or more floors almost always benefit from a wired AP per floor.
  • The property is bigger than about 90 square metres. Above that footprint, a single router stops covering everything and you are into multi-AP territory. Once you are running two or more APs, the cabling becomes the decisive variable.
  • The building has solid internal walls. Victorian terraces, mansion blocks, anything pre-war: solid brick or stone walls block 5 GHz aggressively. Mesh backhaul has to fight those same walls.
  • You work from home seriously. Video calls, large file uploads, low-latency desktop sharing — these need a backhaul that does not fluctuate.
  • You want it to last. Wired APs swapped out every few generations on the same cabling is a fifteen-year solution. Mesh kits get retired wholesale every three to five years as the standard moves.

The decision flowchart, in prose

If you only remember one thing from this article, remember this sequence. It is the same one I run through on the phone before I have even seen the property.

  1. Do you own the property? If no, go to step 4. If yes, continue.
  2. Is the property on more than one floor or larger than around 90 square metres? If yes, wired access points win — go and book a survey. If no, continue.
  3. Do you work from home, run a smart-home with many devices, or want this to outlast the next two router upgrades? If yes, wired still wins. If no, you can use mesh — but consider wiring while you have the chance, because the marginal cost is small and the upside is permanent.
  4. (Rental path.) Can the landlord be persuaded to allow surface-mounted trunking? If yes, wired-backhaul mesh is the best of both worlds — you take the nodes with you when you leave, the trunking stays. If no, wireless-backhaul mesh is your answer; pick a tri-band kit, place the nodes carefully, and accept that you will not get the rated speeds.

That is the whole framework. Everything else is detail.

The middle ground: wired-backhaul mesh

This one deserves its own section because it is the configuration most people forget exists. If you already own a mesh kit and you have any way of running an ethernet cable between the nodes, plug them in by cable. Nearly every modern mesh kit auto-detects the wired link and switches the backhaul over to it. The result is dramatic — the satellite goes from a half-rate radio relay to a full-rate access point, identical in throughput to the parent. You keep the nice consumer app and the simple roaming, but you lose the wireless-backhaul penalty.

I do this conversion on existing mesh setups every month or two. The conversation usually starts "I spent good money on this mesh and the upstairs is still slow." Half the time the fix is wiring the backhaul; the other half is replacing the upstairs node with a proper PoE access point. Both are improvements, but if the existing mesh hardware is recent the wiring conversion is the smaller intervention.

PoE-fed APs — the gold standard explained

For an owned property of any size, the configuration I install when the brief is "do it properly and forget about it" is PoE-fed access points. Here is why.

  • One cable per AP. Cat6 carries both the data and the power. No mains spur needed at the AP location, which means the AP can go on a ceiling or high on a wall — where it should be — without a visible plug nearby.
  • Centralised power. The PoE switch sits in the comms cupboard. If a single AP misbehaves you reboot it from the switch, not by climbing a ladder.
  • Real radios. Business-class APs run more honest radios — better antennas, better cooling, real 802.11ax (WiFi 6) with full OFDMA scheduling, proper BSS Color implementation, multiple SSIDs, VLAN tagging, fast roaming standards (802.11k/v/r) implemented properly.
  • Independent of the router. Replace the ISP router every contract and the WiFi infrastructure stays untouched. The router becomes just a gateway. The WiFi keeps running.
  • Repairable. A failed AP is a single twenty-pound part swap. A failed mesh kit means everything goes back in the box.

The piece on 802.11ax explained covers OFDMA and BSS Color in more depth if you want to understand what those acronyms actually do for a busy household.

Where mesh and wired differ in day-to-day use

It is worth being specific about what "better" actually feels like.

  • Throughput in the far room. Wireless-backhaul mesh: roughly half what you get at the parent. Wired AP: roughly the same as the parent, because the parent is just another AP on the same cable.
  • Latency. Wireless backhaul adds milliseconds to every packet — usually 5 to 15 ms additional, which is invisible for browsing but noticeable on a video call or a gaming session.
  • Roaming. Both can do it. Properly configured wired APs with 802.11k/v/r generally roam more cleanly because each AP is full-strength and the boundary is decided by signal, not by mesh routing politics.
  • Smart-home density. Modern households often have 40 to 80 connected devices. Wired APs handle device density better because each AP has its own radio capacity and is not also using that capacity for backhaul.
  • Guest network isolation. Both can offer a guest SSID. Wired APs typically isolate it more cleanly using VLANs.
  • Failure modes. Mesh: if the parent node fails, the whole network is down. Wired APs: if one AP fails, the others keep going.

Three real scenarios from the field

A rented Hackney flat — mesh was the right call

A young professional renting a two-bedroom Hackney conversion flat — first floor of a converted Victorian house, around 70 square metres. The bedroom router from the ISP gave reasonable coverage to the bedroom and the kitchen but the front living room (the other end of the flat) dropped to one bar. The tenancy agreement explicitly prohibited any drilling or fixings beyond picture hooks.

Wired was off the table. I installed a small two-node tri-band mesh kit — one node in the bedroom replacing the ISP router's WiFi, one in the hallway about midway through the flat with reasonable line-of-sight to both ends. Wireless backhaul, but tri-band so the dedicated radio carried the satellite traffic. Result: the front living room went from one bar to consistent strong signal. Not the same speed as the bedroom node — about 65% of the throughput — but more than enough for streaming, video calls and work. When she moved out a year later, the kit went in a bag and went with her. That is mesh doing the job it is best at.

A Wimbledon family home — mesh disappointed, wired retrofitted

Wimbledon semi-detached, three floors plus a loft conversion, around 180 square metres. The family had bought a premium three-node mesh kit on a friend's recommendation. They had been using it for nearly two years. The complaint when they rang me: the loft conversion was unreliable, the back garden was a dead zone, and the kitchen island — where everyone sat with laptops in the evening — was patchy.

The pre-call expectation was that we would add a fourth node. The survey told a different story. The three existing mesh nodes were placed roughly correctly, but the wireless backhaul from the parent (in the front hall, near the ISP router) to the third-floor satellite was running across two solid brick walls and a thick floor — that backhaul link was the bottleneck for the entire loft. No amount of additional nodes would have fixed it; they would all have queued for the same constrained parent uplink.

I quoted a wired retrofit. Cat6 runs through the existing service cupboards to four locations: ground-floor hall, first-floor landing, second-floor landing, and an outdoor-rated AP under the back eaves to cover the garden and patio. PoE switch in the under-stairs cupboard. The existing mesh nodes were retired. The new APs delivered consistent -55 dBm or better everywhere inside the house, -65 dBm in the back third of the garden, and the kitchen island went from patchy to invisible — i.e. nobody mentions it any more. That is the wired story; not glamorous, just relentlessly reliable. The piece on WiFi in large London properties goes deeper into how these multi-floor coverage problems play out.

A small Camden business — wired paid off in year one

A small specialist agency in Camden — around twelve staff in a single first-floor office of perhaps 140 square metres, all working on laptops, all on video calls all day. They had inherited a consumer router from the previous tenant. By month three the principal was ringing me because calls were dropping and large file uploads to the cloud were stalling mid-transfer.

The survey showed two things: massive 2.4 GHz congestion from neighbouring offices, and the consumer router was simply not designed for sustained multi-client load. I installed two PoE-fed business APs on the ceiling — one at each end of the office — fed from a small PoE switch in the comms cupboard. Both APs running 802.11ax with OFDMA enabled, which materially improves performance when you have a dozen devices all transmitting small simultaneous packets (video call audio, in particular). Guest WiFi on a separate VLAN. A wired ethernet drop also went to each desk so anyone running a heavy upload could pull the cable and bypass WiFi entirely.

Within the first year the agency reported that the network had effectively become invisible — which is the highest compliment a network gets. No dropouts, no stalls, no support callouts. The marginal cost over a consumer mesh kit was small. The reliability difference was night and day.

Common objections, answered straight

"My building won't take cabling"

That is sometimes true, often half-true. Surface-mounted mini-trunking in white or black runs along skirting and door frames almost invisibly, and most landlords will permit it where they refuse chased-in cabling. Loft and floor-void runs avoid visible cabling entirely. The honest "we can't run any cable anywhere" properties are rarer than people think. I will tell you on site whether a wired retrofit is realistic for your building, no obligation.

"Mesh is easier to set up"

True. App-based pairing and one SSID is genuinely easier. But "easier to set up" and "the right tool" are not the same question. The setup is a one-time event. The performance is everyday.

"Won't WiFi 7 fix this?"

WiFi 7 adds bandwidth and clever multi-link operation, but it does not change the underlying truth that a radio link cannot beat a wire for sustained throughput. WiFi 7 mesh will still have the wireless-backhaul tax, just with a higher absolute ceiling. Wiring will still win on long-term reliability.

"What about powerline adapters as a halfway house?"

Powerline adapters are unpredictable. They depend on the quality and topology of your mains wiring, which in a London flat is usually a mystery. They share the link with every appliance on the same ring. They drop out when someone runs the washing machine. I will install them where there is no other option, but they are not a substitute for an ethernet cable. The general piece on why WiFi boosters and extenders disappoint covers the related category in more detail.

So which one do you want?

If you have read this far, the answer for your situation is probably already obvious to you. Owned, multi-floor, larger than a small flat: wired access points, PoE-fed, with Cat6 back to a central switch. Rented, can't run cable, small footprint: mesh, tri-band, well-placed. Anything in the middle: have a conversation about wired-backhaul mesh, because it is often the best of both options.

If you want to talk it through specifically for your property, the WiFi booster and access point page covers the install side, and the London broadband engineer page covers how WiFi planning links up with your line. The flat-specific case is covered in WiFi in London apartments and conversion flats, which has more on routing cable in awkward Victorian buildings.

What I will say is: in the fifteen years I have been doing this, the customers who have wired up — even where mesh would have done the job — almost never regret it. The customers who went mesh-only in a building that wanted wiring almost always end up upgrading. Make the decision that fits your property, not the one the box on the shelf is pushing.

Ring 020 3633 1131. Honest advice, freely given.