Wi-Fi Coverage Calculator

Wi-Fi signal loses strength passing through walls, and how much it loses depends heavily on what those walls are made of — this calculator bakes that in as a coverage-per-access-point figure that shrinks from 1,500 sq ft for open drywall construction down to 1,200 for plaster, 800 for brick, and just 600 for dense concrete, reflecting how much harder radio waves have to work to get through denser materials. It splits your home's total square footage evenly across however many floors you specify, then figures out how many access points each floor needs on its own (since Wi-Fi doesn't propagate well between floors either) before summing across all floors — so a two-story home with weak floor penetration ends up needing more total coverage than the same square footage on one level. Equipment cost applies a small bulk discount, $120 rather than $150 per unit, once you're buying three or more access points, mirroring how mesh kits are typically sold in multi-packs.

The bandwidth estimate models a Wi-Fi 6 access point sharing roughly 600 Mbps of aggregate throughput across every device connected to it, then applies a 70% real-world efficiency factor to account for protocol overhead and contention, so the per-device number reported is realistic capacity rather than a marketing spec. If more than one access point comes out of the calculation, the tool flags mesh as recommended, since juggling multiple standalone routers without a unified mesh system typically means dead zones at the handoff points and manual network switching as you move through the house. Keep in mind these coverage figures assume a single-story-equivalent open layout per floor; heavy furniture, metal ductwork, or an unusually chopped-up floor plan can shrink real-world coverage below the estimate.