wifi for a two-floor house, ethernet backhaul

[tinkerer]

I have a two floor house, approximately 100m2 each (or 1100 square feet/floor). Wifi is provided by an aging D-Link router on the ground floor (really bad connection wifi), and an Asus AC68U for the top floor (decent, but aging), they are connected by an ethernet cable.

I would like to upgrade the wifi, to have 4-5 access points in total. I can use the attic to add ethernet cables (and power, though I would prefer PoE if possible), the top floor is separated from the attic by plasterboard and wood. Interior walls are 10cm hollow brick and mortar.

Wifi does not need to be super-fast, just reliable and robust. Main use is browsing, occasional movies. I envision a setup like this:

          ground floor AP 1 (should cover 6m radius through 2 thin brick walls)
          |
modem -- ground floor switch -- top floor switch --- ethernet cable to a printer
                                      |
                                      |-- AP 2
                                      |-- AP 3
                                      |-- AP 4
                                     (\-- AP 5 if needed)

The ground floor AP needs to be stronger because I can only wire one with ethernet without breaking walls. I have the tools to crimp ethernet cables, done it before.

What system would you recommend? All else equal, I am partial to Asus as I used Asuswrt-Merlin firmware and got frequent updates, but I am open to all suggestions. I also heard about Ubiquity and similar options from Netgear, but I haven't used any of these brands.

Recommendations for concrete models (switches, access points, probably a more capable unit to manage the whole circus) would be appreciated. Modem is provided by my internet company.

 

[tgl]

The trouble with ASUS for this use-case is that they don't sell APs per se. They sell all-in-one routers, which are an AP plus a lot more hardware. So if you need four or more APs you're going to be paying for a lot more hardware than you need. You need to look into product lines that include actual APs-and-nothing-but, which generally are more SMB-oriented than consumer-oriented.

I'm currently using UniFi (Ubiquiti) APs and have been mostly pleased with that choice. There is a bit of a learning curve because their documentation is skimpy at best, but they have very active user forums at https://community.ui.com/ that are full of helpful people. I've heard positive things about TP-Link's Omada line (not so much about their TP-Link-branded consumer gear), but have no personal experience there. I can disrecommend Netgear's Orbi line: inflexible, expensive, definitely not better than ASUS. Maybe some other Netgear product lines are better, but again no experience.