Wireless networking

Why mountain houses defeat consumer Wi-Fi

The construction methods common in the Roaring Fork Valley are close to worst-case for wireless. Heavy timber frames and stone walls absorb signal. Foil-faced insulation and radiant heating in the floors act as reflectors between storeys. Low-E glazing attenuates anything trying to reach a terrace. Properties are large, often on multiple levels, and frequently include a guest house, a garage, a ski room or a barn that also needs coverage.

The answer is not a more powerful router. It is a properly designed system of wired access points, positioned against the floor plan, on channels planned so they don't interfere with each other or with the neighbours.

How we design a network

We work from the drawings at pre-wire stage and specify a hard-wired run to every access point, every television, every camera, every touchscreen and every piece of AV equipment. Anything that can be wired gets wired — wireless is reserved for things that genuinely move. This is the single biggest determinant of whether a house feels fast in five years' time.

Switching and routing live in a ventilated rack with proper power protection. We use Araknis, Ubiquiti and Cisco Meraki depending on the scale of the property and how it will be managed.

Segmentation and security

Cameras, control systems, guest devices and the family's own computers should not share a flat network. We segment them into separate VLANs with a guest network that can't see anything else, keep firmware current, and configure the firewall properly rather than leaving the ISP router in place doing whatever it does by default.

Redundancy and remote management

Where internet reliability matters — and for a house you're monitoring from elsewhere it does — we configure failover to a second connection or a cellular backup, so cameras and control stay reachable when the primary line drops. All of it is cloud-managed, so we can diagnose from our office rather than driving up the valley.