★Residential · Service

Whole-home Wi-Fi and large-home upgrades · Kansas City.

IntegrateIT designs, installs and upgrades whole-home networks and Wi-Fi for large homes across the Kansas City metro from Overland Park, Kansas. A large-home Wi-Fi upgrade in Kansas City is an access-point count problem, not a router problem. A 6,000–10,000 square foot home here typically lands at five to eight wired access points — not one router and a couple of mesh nodes. The starting rule is roughly one access point per 2,500 sq ft, and in this metro the building pushes that number up: a walkout lower level behaves like a separate structure to a radio, plaster over wire lath in the older wings blocks rather than attenuates, and the foil-faced insulation common in Johnson County construction reflects radio as well as heat. We audit the network you already have, keep the cable that is still good, and replace the layer that is actually failing. Call (913) 804-7575 or office@integrateit.tech.

Why the network you have stopped keeping up

The call is rarely that the Wi-Fi never worked. It is that the Wi-Fi used to be fine. Three things change underneath a large house and none of them announce themselves.

The device count goes up and never comes back down. Nothing gets added one at a time — thermostats, shades, locks, doorbells, two camera systems, a robot vacuum per floor, a TV in every room that phones home whether you use it or not. Pull the client list off almost any large-home router and the total is higher than the household would guess, and higher this year than last. Most of those devices are slow, chatty, and they consume airtime out of all proportion to the data they move.

The house gets finished. The basement that was storage becomes a media room with a wet bar and a wall of steel appliances. The screened porch gets glassed in. Somebody adds a shop or a pool house forty yards from the panel. Every one of those is a new coverage problem the original design never had to solve.

And the plan gets faster while the coverage stays the same. Google Fiber, Spectrum and AT&T all serve parts of this metro and all of them will happily sell you a bigger number. If the room next to the router is fast and the bedroom over the garage is not, the bottleneck is inside the house and the plan is money spent on the wrong side of the wall.

An upgrade is therefore not “buy a better router.” It is deciding which layer failed — coverage, capacity, cabling, or segmentation — and replacing only that one.

How many access points a large Kansas City home needs

Start from square footage, then let the building correct it. It corrects upward here more often than not.

Those are design starting points, not a quote. The count that ends up on your proposal comes off the site walk, and the fixed price comes with it.

Three rules ride on top of that table. A walkout lower level almost always adds one access point regardless of what the square footage suggests. Every detached structure is its own count, not a fraction of the main house. And an outdoor space you actually use — pool, patio, sport court — is a coverage zone, not an afterthought; it gets a rated outdoor access point rather than the spillover from an interior one.

How to upgrade a large-home network without doing it twice

The order matters more than the equipment. Done out of sequence, this work gets bought twice.

1. Measure in two places before buying anything. Run a speed test wired directly at the ONT or modem, then run the same test on the same laptop in the worst room. If the first number is good and the second is bad, this is a coverage and capacity problem inside the house, and no ISP plan change will touch it.
2. Count what is actually connected. Pull the client list off the existing router rather than estimating it. The total often comes in well above what the household expects, because every television, streaming box, console, camera, thermostat, lock and controller on the network counts — and it is that number, not the square footage, that decides how much segmentation and how much switch capacity the upgrade needs.
3. Find the cable you already own. Nearly every Kansas City house built from the mid-1990s onward has coax run to bedrooms and living areas for television, and most of it is now doing nothing — MoCA adapters turn it into a genuinely wired multi-gigabit path with no wall opened. Existing Cat5e is also worth keeping: it carries gigabit and PoE perfectly well, and a clean Cat5e run is a better backhaul than a new wireless hop.
4. Map access points by room, not by square footage. Walk the house and place radios against the walls that actually exist — the fireplace chase, the appliance wall, the poured basement, the tile-and-lath bathroom cluster. The table above is the starting number; the walk is the real one.
5. Take everything off Wi-Fi that does not need to be on it. Televisions, streaming boxes, consoles, printers, the camera recorder, the automation controller — all furniture, all wireable. Every one you leave on wireless is competing for airtime against a phone that has no alternative.
6. Segment on the way in, not later. Retrofitting VLANs onto a live house means re-onboarding every smart device by hand. Doing it during the upgrade is configuration rather than construction — the four-VLAN split (Main, IoT, Guest, Cameras) is our standard install, not an add-on.
7. Tune, then re-measure. Transmit power, channel widths and roaming thresholds are the difference between a correctly specified network that feels wrong and one that feels invisible. Then repeat step 1 and confirm the worst room moved.

What we keep, and what gets replaced

An upgrade is a subtraction problem first. On a typical large-home retrofit:

Usually kept. Existing Cat5e and Cat6 runs that test clean, the coax already in the walls, the ISP’s fiber ONT, camera cabling, and any in-wall conduit somebody was smart enough to leave. If a cable path exists, we would rather reuse it than open a ceiling.

Usually replaced. The consumer router doing routing, switching, DHCP and Wi-Fi in one box. Unmanaged switches with no PoE budget — a PoE switch is what lets an access point live on a ceiling in the middle of a room instead of near an outlet at the edge of it. Access points sitting on bookshelves and inside cabinets. And any mesh node that is relaying rather than wired, because a relaying radio puts the same packet into the air twice and roughly halves the throughput at that node, exactly when the house is busiest. The full arithmetic behind that, and the four cases where mesh is still the right call, is here.

Usually added. Cat6A to the access-point locations that have no path today, an outdoor-rated radio for the pool or patio, a managed PoE switch sized with headroom, and a rack that the next person can read — which is its own piece of work and the thing that decides how long the equipment lives.

Timing is the one variable that moves the number more than any equipment choice. Structured wiring at framing stage is inexpensive; the same runs after drywall become fishing, patching and paint. If you are renovating anyway, pull the cable now. What sits inside each network tier by home size is laid out in the Kansas City home network cost guide, and the symptom side — which dropout means coverage versus congestion versus a bad handoff — is covered in why your Wi-Fi keeps dropping.

What we install

• Ubiquiti UniFi UDM Pro or Pro Max router. Enterprise-grade routing in a residential form factor — VLANs, VPN, intrusion detection, full traffic insight.
• UniFi Wi-Fi 6E and Wi-Fi 7 access points, ceiling-mounted and wired. U6-Pro, U7-Pro and U7-Pro Max — full coverage of the 6 GHz band, MLO on Wi-Fi 7. One access point per ~2,500 sq ft is the starting count; a large home with a walkout, an original plaster wing and a pool house is a five-to-eight radio design, and every one of them gets a cable.
• Outdoor access points. UniFi U6-Mesh and U7-Outdoor for backyards, pool houses and garages — same dashboard.
• Managed PoE switching. UniFi switches sized to the house, with a PoE budget that covers access points, cameras, access readers and signage on one rack.
• Structured cabling to every access point location and IoT zone. Cat6a CMP, properly terminated, certified to TIA-568 Class EA.
• Four-VLAN standard. Main, IoT, Guest and Cameras. IoT cannot reach Main, Guest is captive-portal isolated, Cameras have no internet egress.
• Remote-monitored. We see the network drop before you do, and we service the platform after the install.

Common questions