SUMMARY BY CHATGPT

Topic: Improving Your Home Wi-Fi – Routers, Extenders, and Mesh Systems
Why This Matters:
Tom notices many of his students have poor internet, leading to Zoom call issues and general online business inefficiency. This episode breaks down how to fix common Wi-Fi problems in a simple, non-technical way.
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Key Points Covered:
1. Wired is Best
• Always prefer hardwired (Ethernet) connections when possible – more stable and faster.
• Use at least Cat6 cables.
• Aesthetics shouldn't override functionality if you're serious about running an online business.
2. Router Placement Basics
• Most homes use a router to distribute Wi-Fi.
• Poor signal in far parts of a house is common.
• If possible, move the router to a central location in your home for better coverage.
3. Measure Your Signal
• Use Speedtest by Ookla to check signal strength in different parts of your home.
• Test at consistent times for accurate comparisons.
• Avoid placing routers in closets or hidden spots.
4. Use Wi-Fi Extenders for Small Fixes
• If just a couple rooms have bad signals, a Wi-Fi extender (as cheap as $50) can help.
• Make sure it’s compatible with your router and placed near dead zones.
5. Upgrade to a Mesh System for Larger Homes
• For large or multi-story homes (like Tom’s 7500 sq. ft. retreat center), use a Mesh Wi-Fi system (e.g., Eero 6E).
• Involves multiple nodes that create overlapping Wi-Fi zones.
• First node connects to router; others are distributed throughout the home.
• Great for covering complex spaces, brick walls, and multiple floors.
6. Outdoor Wi-Fi Tips
• Place mesh nodes near windows to help signal reach outdoor areas like pools and patios.
• Consider outdoor Wi-Fi extenders for extended range (e.g., fire pit areas).
7. Powerline Extenders (Alternative Option)
• Uses your home’s electrical wiring to transmit internet to hard-to-reach places.
• Involves plugging devices into power outlets at each location.
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Final Advice:
• Match your Wi-Fi solution to the size and layout of your home.
• Run speed tests to verify performance and hold your ISP accountable if you're not getting what you pay for.
• Don’t let poor internet hold back your online business potential.
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Resources Mentioned:
• Free automation book and mentor program: GreatInternetMarketingTraining.com
• Internet marketing school: IMTCVA.org

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Episode 982 – Mesh WiFi
[00:00:08] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.

[00:00:24] Hey everybody! It's Tom here with episode 982 of Screw the Commute podcast. Today we're going to talk about some Wi-Fi stuff. You know, so many of my students just don't understand what's going on with this. And their zoom things lock up and it takes forever to upload or download stuff. So we're going to talk about what to do about that today. Hope you didn't miss episode 981 that was reviewed deletions. This is going to tell you, you know, you kill yourself to get good reviews. But did you realize that like 73% of five star reviews get deleted by Google. All right. So so I'm going to tell you what to do about that kind of stuff. Make sure you pick up a copy of our automation book. It's free. And check out my mentor program, the longest running, most unique, most successful ever in the field of internet and Digital marketing at GreatInternetMarketingTraining.com. And don't forget participation in that. Get you a scholarship to the only licensed, dedicated internet and digital marketing school in the country. I am certified to operate by Schev, the State Council on Higher Education in Virginia. But you don't have to live in Virginia because it's distance learning. Okay. What we're going to talk about today is router versus Wi-Fi extender versus mesh systems. All right. Now this isn't going to be a a big technical discussion. So don't worry about that. But why am I talking about this. Well, you know, I've had 1800 high level students of all walks of life, big professionals and beginners and young people.

[00:02:06] And I just noticed that they don't really understand what's going on with their internet connection. And like I said, they you know, I'm trying to do a zoom training call with them and it says unstable connection or or it just locks up and I see their picture just static right there. And it's totally dead. You know, it just waste so much time for all of us. Now, I will say that hard wired connections are always the best, and that's with what they call a cat cable. And if you if you go buy a cat cable, make sure it's at least a cat six for when I'm recording this. That's the speed it can handle. So if you hardwire, it's always going to give you the fastest possible speeds that you and more stable connection than any Wi-Fi ever. Now, here's the thing. Yeah, it's a pain in the neck sometimes to run wires. But I had one student who didn't want to want to run a wire because, oh, it'll ruin the aesthetics of my new condo. And she's there trying to get, you know, do internet business. And her crappy internet provider was bad enough as it is. And then she made it worse by trying to use Wi-Fi in this building that it just sucked. So either get serious about doing an internet business and put up with some wires sometimes, or don't do an internet business.

[00:03:38] Go, you know, whatever you want to do, okay? But anyway, these Ethernet wires and some of the new houses and apartments are already pre-wired, so that can help you out if you just check that out with the landlord, or when you purchase a house to see what the story is on the Ethernet Pre-wired houses. All right, so here's the deal. Pretty much everybody starts out with what is called a router. It's usually a little plastic box with some antennas sticking up, little like 6 or 8 inch antennas sticking up out of it. And that's where the internet comes into your house and goes into that router. And then you can either plug into the router I mean you can do actually do both. You could plug into the router if you want a hardwired connection somewhere far from the router. Or the router sends out Wi-Fi signals that you can pick up on your cell phone, tablet and desktops. Okay, well, here's the deal with that. Let's say you have a house, and the internet connection comes in on one end of the house, and that's where they're going to put the router. Well, that router has got to send a wireless signal through all your walls and all the crap in your house all the way to the other end of the house. All right. And usually it'll crap out halfway through your house, at least if you have just a reasonably small house.

[00:05:09] So what do you do about that? Let's say this is the first level. We're not talking fancy mesh systems and all this stuff, just the first level. Well, if you can run a wire from where your your internet coming into your house and either under your floor, under your carpets, over your ceiling, or even, you know, if you're desperate, just running around the baseboard and then put your router in the middle of your house. This way, instead of having to send the signal all the way to the other end of your house, it's only sending it halfway because it's in the middle of your house. So it covers one side of your house and the other side of your house. So that would be the first thing I would try if I didn't want to, you know, buy these bigger things that help handle it. Just place the router better. Now, this is probably a good time to tell me. Well, how do you tell what your signal really is? Well, you can do what's called a speed test. And the most famous one, and the one I've been using for years and years and years is. And it's usually the first one that comes up if you if you Google speed test, it's by Ookla. I'm not sure it makes any difference, but that's the one I use just for consistency. So basically you just log on to it on your cell phone, your tablet or your laptop or your desktop.

[00:06:43] But if you're trying to find out to where to place things in your house, it's best if you use a tablet or cell phone. I mean, because it's a little bit unwieldy to carry your laptop around, you know, and try to do this, but you can. But anyway, you log on to Ookla and you stand in a certain place or a speed test by Ookla, and then you they hit go. And then you just wait about a minute and it gives you an upload and download speed, and then you go somewhere else in your house and do the same thing. Usually at the same time of day, because internet can change depending on time of day and how many people are on it. So you go somewhere else in your house and you say, oh geez, right at my desk. I'm getting a terrible upload and download speed, but over here in the middle of the living room, it's great. So then you move the router, and then you try it again, and you go until you get where the where you need the best signal, where you place the router so that it gives you the best signal where you need it. All right. So that's and you know the higher the better. And don't like bury it in a closet somewhere. You know you got to give it its best chance to get that Wi-Fi signal to you. Okay.

[00:07:59] So that's that would be the first step. Now let's say you got this same house and it's pretty good. And most of the house, but maybe 1 or 2 rooms is terrible. So the next step in the cheapest and easiest step would be to get a Wi-Fi extender. It's called. So basically, uh, you have to make sure it's compatible with your router. But then you pair the two together and you put it over near the place where you're getting the bad signal, and you have to plug it into the wall for power. And then that should jack up the signal, grabs the signal from the router and moves it over to where the dead spots were in your house. And that might do the trick for you. And some of them are as cheap as 50 bucks. Okay, now the next step, and this is one I have to do. I don't really have a choice. I have a 7500 foot. The retreat center here. It's all brick. And also the what your house is made of inside and outside has to do with it. And there's two stories. So this moving that router around is not going to do crap for this place. All right. So that's when you upgrade to what we call a mesh system. And I happen to use uh, a company called ero e e r. And I have the six e version, and it comes in a three pack or a two pack, depending on what you need.

[00:09:36] And in that case, I take it's these little white things, you know, they're I don't know. They're about the size. I don't know of a small like a saucer. And some of them are upright and some of them are flat. Doesn't make any difference. And I plug it into the router. The first one. And these are each place where you put one of these things is called a node. Node. But the first one you plug it with a wire into your router. Doesn't matter how long the the wire is. Even. So, you can run 100ft from your router and still beautiful. Plug your node in wherever you need it, because that node is going to be hardwired to your router. Get a great signal and then it's going to throw Wi-Fi out into the to the world in your house. Okay. And one thing here's another little sidebar here is if it's near a window, like I have one in my kitchen. And from the kitchen you can see through the windows out to the pool. So Wi-Fi signal loves windows. It goes through them easily. So I placed it so that I don't have to put another outdoor one, which are more expensive, out to the pool and the tennis court area. It goes right through the window, and I walked clear to the end of my pool, which is a, I don't know, 50,000 gallon pool is enormous. And I got good signal clear to the end of the pool where nobody really would.

[00:11:06] You know, all the chairs are even closer than that. So the pool chairs. So so that's a tip for you if you want to cover some outside stuff is keep it near a window. Okay. So now I have one node plugged into the router wherever it needs to be. And then that node is going to send signals to its other nodes. So I bought a three pack to start with. And then I bought another three pack. So I got six in this giant house here. But here's how it works. After the first one is plugged into the router, it sends a signal to another one of those things that has to be plugged into the wall. And the other one picks it up and then distributes where it's at. And so I have one here near my podcast station. I have one over in my other living room. Then I have one above it in the breezeway. I have one in the upstairs hallway. I have one in the master bedroom suite. So they all are sending signals to each other to make those areas have really good speed. And I can walk around with my cell phone and say, oh, look at this. I'm getting massive, great speed where I used to get crap speed. All right, so that's called a mesh system that's more expensive, no doubt. And when I was buying it at Best Buy, this is something I hate to have to say.

[00:12:32] This kind of stuff that TP-Link used to be one of the the top people to do this, that was the brand. But as some of you may know, DJI, the Chinese drone company, is under attack and could get banned. And so the guy said, don't you know, I'm afraid to suggest TP-Link stuff anymore, which used to like I said, it used to be one of the greatest ones because of all the anti-Chinese sentiment about it and might get banned. So. So, uh, Eero is a very good brand, Eero. And you can even go up to Wi-Fi seven. But I mean, it gets really, really expensive then. So. So Eero six is what I got, and it's, uh, it's kicking butt on this house. Now, one other thing is I can run a wire from the first node all the way to my garage TV studio, which is another three 4000 square foot building, but it's 100ft from the main building, so I can run a hard wire from one of the nodes, or the main node that's hooked to the router all the way to that other building, and then plug in another couple nodes there and it covers the, uh, me working on cars. It covers the TV studio, it covers the whole garage. And past that is our fire pit area and gazebo and covers that. So now it is possible, if I really needed a lot of coverage at the fire pit, which we don't use all that often.

[00:14:12] I would put an outside extender on the outside of the building, waterproof and and send the signal even further there, but don't really need that at this point. So anyway, that's what mesh systems do. Now, there's one other thing that's a possibility that I personally haven't ever used. It's called a power line extender. And it uses the electrical wires in your house. And there's two parts to it. So you plug in one one part of your house, and then you plug in the other at the dead spot that you're trying to get good signal. And it uses the electrical wires in your house to get through all the obstacles to give you a good signal in that area. So that's called a power line extender. All right. So anyway, let's break this down. You can if a small house you can use a router and then even, uh, go to a Wi-Fi extender really cheap and easily. Just place the router properly and so forth, and you should be all right when you get to bigger houses. You probably want to go to a mesh system because the Wi-Fi extenders, you'd have to get to many of them, and they're not that great to start with. They're real cheap. You know, they're only designed to for small areas. So you want to go to a mesh system. Then just learn how to use the speed test to walk around and find the dead spots and keep moving the nodes around till you get them higher speeds where you need them the most.

[00:15:46] And there you go. So that's a little bit on should help you get your speeds up. Quit the unstable connection errors. Now if you notice and you're doing these speed tests and you notice you're not getting the speeds that you're paying for with your internet provider, a lot of these things will allow you to print out a thing of all the speeds you've checked, and then you use that as proof, because a lot of these internet providers are scumbags and, you know, they sell you one thing, but, you know, with the caveat, oh, whenever you'll never get that maximum speed, but if it's half the speed you're paying for, you should be complaining about it. And but this gives you some proof because you can do all these speed tests and print out the results and say, look, this is not acceptable. You either give me a discount if you can't increase the speed or get me the speed that I'm paying for. All right. So that's my story and I'm sticking to it. If you want help with this, let me have my tech guys and me and the marketing and the video. All the crap that we teach you. Check out my mentor program at GreatInternetMarketingTraining.com and my school at IMTCVA.org. All right, we'll catch you all in the next episode. See you later.