London town houses are the same building, give or take, from Islington to Camberwell: four or five floors of brick, lath-and-plaster walls, joists thick with old pipework, a basement kitchen where everyone congregates, and a loft conversion the previous owner added for a study. Then somebody screws a single router to the hall wall on the ground floor and wonders why FaceTime drops out on the top landing. The honest fix for WiFi town house London coverage is rarely a better router. It is wiring — one Cat6 cable per floor, one ceiling-mount access point per floor, all PoE-fed from a single switch. It is not glamorous, but it is the only thing that genuinely works.

I have spent years carrying spools of Cat6 up and down Georgian and Victorian staircases. Different postcode, same building. Below is what I tell clients about why the obvious fixes fail in a tall, narrow house, and what I do instead.

Why a single router never covers a town house

WiFi at 5 GHz, where the speed lives, is a delicate thing. It struggles through one brick wall and gives up completely through two. London town houses make that worse because the signal does not just have to travel sideways through partitions — it has to travel vertically through floors. And town-house floors are not friendly to radio.

Vertical signal loss is brutal

A typical Victorian floor between two rooms in an Islington terrace contains: original pine joists, often eight or nine inches deep; a layer of old lath and plaster on the ceiling below; sometimes a layer of pugging — a mix of lime, ash and sand — laid between the joists as fire-stopping and sound-deadening; floorboards on top; underlay; carpet or engineered oak; and, in any house that has been renovated in the last twenty years, a generous layer of foil-faced acoustic insulation under the boards. That stack absorbs 5 GHz to a degree that surprises people who only ever read range claims on the router box.

So if your router lives on the ground floor near the front door — which is usually where the OpenReach engineer terminated the fibre — your phone two floors up is trying to see a signal through two of those slabs, plus whichever walls happen to be in the way. SNR collapses. The phone might still say it has bars (modern phones lie politely), but throughput is awful. The deeper version of this lives in what actually blocks your WiFi signal; the headline is that lath, foil and pugging are quietly worse than brick.

Basement kitchens are a special case

In almost every town house I see, the kitchen is in the basement — often with a side-return extension on top — and that is where the family lives. It is also the worst place in the house for the router signal: below ground, under a thick suspended ground-floor structure, with the meter cupboard, fridge, microwave and a thicket of metalwork all crowded into one space. If the router is on the ground floor pointing into a basement, you are pushing signal through a heavily-loaded mid-floor. If the router is in the basement next to the broadband entry point, you are pushing signal upwards through that same mid-floor to the rest of the house. Either way one part of the home is in a hole. There is no router placement that magically covers the whole stack from a single point — the geometry forbids it.

Loft conversions and dormer windows

Loft conversions are the opposite end of the same problem. Most are built with timber stud walls, foil-faced PIR insulation packed between rafters, plasterboard, and sometimes a steel beam or two across the new floor where structural support was needed. The combination of foil, metal and three storeys of timber and brick between the loft and the router on the ground floor turns the loft into a near-perfect dead zone. Adding one mesh node in the master bedroom on the second floor does not save you — you are still asking that node to hear a poor signal from below, halve it, and pass it on.

The "two routers in a row" anti-pattern

A specific bit of bad advice keeps reappearing in town houses, and I will name it here so you can dodge it. People plug their old router into a LAN port of the new one and stick it on a different floor, often with the same SSID, hoping it acts as a second access point. It does not. Two consumer routers on the same network normally end up with both their DHCP servers fighting, both NATs in play, both setting themselves as gateway, devices roaming unpredictably between them, and a network that needs rebooting once a week.

A proper access point is a single-purpose box. It does not do DHCP, does not do NAT, does not have an opinion about routing. It just broadcasts WiFi and forwards traffic back through the cable to the real router. That is why an AP per floor works and two routers in a stack do not. The mesh WiFi vs wired access points piece walks through the trade-offs in more detail.

The right answer: one AP per floor, all wired, all PoE

The pattern I install in town houses week in, week out:

  1. A small PoE switch in a tidy location — usually near the existing master socket and router, often a basement utility cupboard or a hall coat-cupboard.
  2. A single Cat6 (or Cat6a, if the client wants headroom for WiFi 6E and 7) running up to each floor inside a vertical riser — the space behind a fitted wardrobe, an old service void, a coving channel, or as part of the new decorating works if the house is being refurbished.
  3. At each floor, the cable terminates on a Keystone in a discreet location and feeds a ceiling-mount 802.11ax (WiFi 6) access point centred on the landing or a hallway.
  4. Every AP runs the same SSID and password, with band steering and fast roaming, so devices hand off floor-to-floor without dropping the call.
  5. Optional wired drops at the TV, the home office, the kitchen, the games console — added for very little extra cost while the kit is open.

One PoE switch. One cable per floor. One AP per floor. That is it. The deeper reason this works is that each AP broadcasts a strong, fresh signal in the floor it serves, and the floor-to-floor signal loss that previously killed coverage now works in your favour — it stops each AP from drowning the others, so a phone on the second floor cleanly associates with the second-floor AP rather than fighting between two weak signals.

Ceiling-centre matters

Where the AP goes is half the install. A ceiling-mount AP at the centre of a landing is omnidirectional and pushes downward — perfect for the rooms opening off that landing. A wall-mount AP at the end of a long hallway is fine too, with a directional pattern aimed down the hall. What I will not do is hide an AP inside a cupboard, behind a TV, on top of a wardrobe in a far corner. That kind of compromise placement is what produces the "I have a mesh and it is still rubbish" calls.

Why this is the same in Islington, Kensington and Camberwell

The building stock varies in age and finish — Camberwell tends to be late Victorian, Kensington runs older and grander, Islington has a band of crisp Georgian and another of taller late-1800s terraces — but the WiFi problem is structurally identical. Solid masonry party walls. Internal lath-and-plaster. Pugged floors. Basement kitchens. A loft extension that arrived in the last twenty years. The router in the front hall.

You can swap the postcode and the install does not change much. The cable route will differ — Georgian houses sometimes have generous service voids; tall Victorian terraces give you space behind the dado rails; a refurbished Kensington town house often has a vertical chase already cut for AV and underfloor heating. I survey those on arrival and pick the tidiest route. The end result on each floor is the same: a ceiling-mounted AP, a faint LED, and WiFi that simply works.

Three real-world scenarios

1. Islington N1, four-floor Georgian with basement kitchen and loft office

A family in Islington called me after a year of frustration. Router on the ground floor in the front hall. Basement kitchen with two bars and constant Spotify dropouts. Loft office on the third floor with no signal at all most afternoons — the husband was hot-spotting his iPhone to keep his work laptop online. They had bought a three-pack mesh, tried it, and given up.

I ran one Cat6 cable per floor up the inside of an existing service riser behind the dumb-waiter shaft, terminated on a small PoE switch in the basement next to their FTTC modem, and fitted four ceiling-mount 802.11ax APs — one in the kitchen-extension ceiling, one on the ground-floor hall ceiling, one on the second-floor landing, one in the loft. Same SSID throughout. Fluke certified each run. They now move from the basement to the loft on a phone call without it cutting out. I tidied the entry, replaced the old BT master socket with a modern NTE5C, and dropped the original three-pack mesh in a Jiffy bag for them to return.

2. Notting Hill terrace, three random extenders left by the previous owner

The owners had moved into a Notting Hill terrace and found three plug-in extenders left behind on different floors, all powered on, all with the same SSID and password as the original router, all conflicting with each other and producing a network that was technically connected and practically unusable. They were lovely people; they had assumed the previous owners must have known what they were doing.

I unplugged the lot, dropped them in a bag, and ran proper cabling. Cat6 from a new PoE switch in the basement boiler cupboard up to each of three landings, plus a wired drop into the family room for their TV. Three APs, one per floor. The loft conversion was tricky — foil-backed PIR everywhere and a steel I-beam across the floor — but a ceiling-mounted AP inside the loft beat the foil at its own game by broadcasting from underneath it. Total job: a day and a half. The owners said they had spent more on the binned extenders than the proper fix cost.

3. Camberwell town house, WiFi calling for a deaf user that has to work everywhere

This one mattered. A client in Camberwell was profoundly deaf, relied on WiFi calling and real-time captioning on his phone for every conversation, and could not afford to have any room in the house drop the signal mid-sentence. The previous setup was a router in the basement, a mesh node on the first floor, and a basement-kitchen blackspot exactly where he made tea every morning. He had been missing calls from family for months.

I surveyed the house, agreed cable routes that did not disturb the original architraves, ran four Cat6 cables from a PoE switch in the basement — kitchen ceiling, ground floor hall, second floor landing, loft. Four 802.11ax APs configured for fast roaming and 802.11k/v/r so the phone hands off seamlessly between floors. Every floor was tested by walking the house on a sustained WiFi call before I left. He has not missed a call since. The whole job was about making one piece of technology disappear so a person could just live in their house. That is what proper structured wiring does.

What this is not

It is not mesh. It is not a powerline kit. It is not a stronger router. It is not a bigger antenna. Anyone offering you those as a fix for a four-floor town house is selling you something easy, not something that works. I cover the specifics in why WiFi boosters and extenders almost always disappoint, but the executive summary is: every wireless hop halves your bandwidth and adds latency, and town houses by their geometry require multiple hops if you go wireless-only. Wired backhaul takes the hops out of the equation.

How I run the cable in a finished house

Most town-house calls come from finished houses where chasing walls is out of the question. There is usually a way through anyway, and it is part of the craft:

  • Existing risers. Old soil-pipe boxings, dumb-waiter shafts, redundant chimney breasts — every Victorian house has at least one vertical route already.
  • Behind cabinetry. A fitted wardrobe in a bedroom on each floor often lines up vertically with the floor above; a tiny notch in the back of each unit lets a cable pass.
  • Floor-void to floor-void. Where a floor has already been lifted recently — for plumbing, electrics, underfloor heating — I can usually go that way without lifting a single board.
  • External clip-and-cap. As a last resort, a discreet outdoor-grade run in the side return, slipped in behind a downpipe and re-entering at each floor. Tidy, unobtrusive, completely reversible.

I am fussy about how the finished install looks. APs are flush-mounted on the ceiling, cable entries are sealed, terminations live behind faceplates, and there are no loose patch leads hanging out of cupboards. If you cannot tell I have been there apart from the WiFi finally working, I have done it right.

Picking the right kit

For town-house jobs I default to enterprise-grade 802.11ax (WiFi 6) ceiling APs from a known brand — the same kit you would find in a serious office. WiFi 6E is worth specifying in the higher-end refurbishments and any home where the owner is heavy on streaming or video editing; the additional 6 GHz band is uncrowded in residential London and gives a noticeable headroom benefit. PoE is non-negotiable — power and data on one cable, no electrician needed at the AP, no transformer hanging out of a ceiling. The switch is small, fanless, and lives next to the router.

If you are planning a refurbishment and want the network designed in from day one, the ethernet cable service page lays out what we do at first-fix; if you just want the existing house surveyed for dead zones before deciding, the WiFi heat-map survey guide describes what that visit looks like. For day-to-day broadband worries — slow speeds, line faults, master-socket placement — the London broadband engineer page is the right starting point, and the WiFi installation page has the headline services.

The questions I get asked most

Can I keep my existing router?

Almost always, yes. The PoE switch and the APs sit alongside it. The router still does the routing; the APs just give it proper broadcast reach. If the existing router is an OpenReach-supplied unit on FTTC or FTTP, that is fine — your VDSL faceplate or ONT stays exactly where it is. If you want to move the master socket as part of the work, that is a conversation worth having, and I have a page on can I move my master BT socket.

How long does the work take?

A four-floor town house with a typical run pattern is usually a day, occasionally a day and a half if the cable route is awkward. I clean up after myself, I do not leave you with chipped paint or holes, and I certify every run with a Fluke tester.

Will mesh ever be the right answer?

Yes — in a flat with a single floor and a simple shape, or as a quick rental fix where running cable is forbidden. Almost never in a four- or five-floor town house. The structure of the building defeats the marketing.

Ring 020 3633 1131. Honest advice, freely given.