I recently upgraded to RCN’s 1Gbps Internet service* for our family. To get the super-fast download speeds we are paying for, I decided to 
pull some cat 6a ethernet cable through the house. None of the existing wiring or conduits in my home were useful for pulling new cables through; just telephone and alarm cables which were not budging an inch. So I got creative, digging channels into plaster and hiding cable under baseboards, or even using the hollow space behind crown molding to run cable down the hall.
I’ve just finished vacuuming the last of the plaster dust from the hallway. My wife asked, “Why not just buy a better Wi-Fi system? Was installing these cables worth it?” In a word, yes installing the cable was worth it. And I will explain why, and what led me to this point.
RCN’s 1Gbps cable service is not the same as fiber; so upload speeds are still relatively slow, but we’re not 
paying fiber prices either. The real payoff of this cable installation is in getting great download speeds, and here I want to talk about Google Wi-Fi.
I bought four Google Wi-Fi pucks almost three years ago in 2018, and just plugged them in around the house for coverage everywhere. Now it’s 2021, and with my new super-fast Internet I was asking myself the question “Are these pucks able to deliver enough speed?” and weighing the pros of ‘yes, keep them’ against the cons of ‘no, upgrade to something better’.
On the con side is functionality, i.e. the technical specs of these Google Wi-Fi pods. The ones I bought in 2018 are based on IEEE 802.11a/b/g/n/ac AC1200 2×2 Wave 2 Wi-Fi with expandable mesh. Compared to mesh Wi-Fi tech sold on the market today, this original Google Wi-Fi pod system lacks three things:
- it lacks Wi-Fi 6 support
- it has two antennas, not four
- it lacks a dedicated wireless channel for backhaul** between the pucks, meaning a serious reduction in whatever your max potential speed is.
On the pro side, are design and user experience. Looks-wise, these Google Wi-Fi pucks are a great finished product. The pucks are small and look nice and neat, with good design quality. Managing the wireless network with the Google Wi-Fi App is easy and intuitive. Not only that, the Google Wi-Fi App offers enough flexibility (port forwarding, custom DNS etc.) for most people’s needs and even has built-in features such as temporarily prioritizing a device, or limiting screen time for the kids.
Those are some solid pro arguments, so before deciding to upgrade I thought I’d solve at least one of the three things missing on the con side — the lack of a dedicated backhaul channel. I did this by connecting three of our four Google Wi-fi pucks by ethernet cable. (You don’t need to wire all of your pods; prioritize those where you need the highest speeds. It still 
operates as a mesh system, even with some pods wired and some not.) On the puck’s end, connecting to the Ethernet cable was as simple as plugging the cable into the puck’s WAN port and restarting it. Now all our phones, laptops and other connected devices can use the puck’s full bandwidth, freed of the burden of sharing the same frequencies to transmit data back to the primary puck, which is in turn which is plugged into the modem.
As you can see, the difference is HUGE. Before I did this DIY Ethernet backhaul upgrade, my iPhone 11 achieved download speeds of about 132 Mbps. After, speeds were over 450Mbps, 500+Mbps on my MacBook.
If you take Netflix as a reference, the maximum speed Netflix movies use today is ~25mbps. As result of this backhaul, nobody in the family experiences any bottleneck, no matter what they’re doing. We have two kids doing remote learning, and gaming; and two parents working remotely from home. Everyone has maximum video stream quality, great experiences on Zoom and other meeting platforms, gaming lags are low, and large chunks of data download in an eyeblink.
So I can’t think of a reason to spend money to buy a new, upgraded Wi-Fi mesh network at this moment, now that I’ve solved my wireless speed problem. Google Wi-Fi with ethernet backhaul can cover my needs for the next three years, at the very least!
* RCN is an internet service provider available in many big US cities.
** backhaul is the term for data transfer between Wi-Fi pucks