this post was submitted on 08 Dec 2023
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I have never been in any residential situation where just parking a bog standard router roughly central to the building, or even just right next to wherever the cable guy punched into the house, was not perfectly adequate for all users and their myriad devices to receive a reliable wi-fi signal. "Wi-fi penetrating" materials or not. This cat is either residing in a McMansion of epic proportions, or he's overblowing his issues to pad out his word count.
That is not to say that the wiring situation and cabling situation you may inherit will be adequate for tech nerds (myself possibly included) but for the average citizen just tucking your ISP provided router somewhere out of sight is all it takes and is just fine.
You want to talk about headaches? The house I'm living in was built in the 1920's and it's all plaster. I have nowhere to run Cat6, other than stapled to the underside of the floorboards from the basement, and surface mount boxes coming up thruogh the floor. For my upstairs runs I have to run it in channel up the rear corners of closets where it's out of sight, and punch up through the ceiling and the floor above. Pulling cable through the walls is a non-starter; most of the interior walls don't even have an air gap between what should be the inside faces. Pull that off and you can come back and talk to me about "hurdles."
My house was built in the 80s. I am not aware of any special materials, but the pipes and wiring in the wall more or less kill all cell signal if you aren't on the side of the house facing the tower (I forget the term for it, but I have the kind of baseboard heaters that use hot water). And considering a lot of other houses in the neighborhood have the same issue, it rapidly becomes one or two rooms where I have cell reception. Actually means I bother to set up a guest network on my wifi so that people who come over that I don't trust to have access to my personal network can still receive texts and the like.
In terms of wifi? If I put the wireless access point in the living room, I more or less have signal. But my drop is in the basement (which is awesome for my server room needs) and that means upstairs has a LOT of dead zones.
It really depends on construction, but this is WHY office buildings are designed around this. I just don't think apartment complexes need to be because you are going to have an ethernet drop in every unit anyway.
I have, everywhere I've lived for the last 15+ years.
Plenty of materials in walls to kill signal.