Networks
Why your Wi-Fi dies past the pool house
Because radio waves do not go through a metre of stone, and no router sold to consumers will change that. The fix is never a bigger router — it's more access points, each with its own cable, positioned so the signal never has to cross the worst walls.
What's actually happening
Wi-Fi is radio, and radio is attenuated by mass. A plasterboard stud wall costs you a few decibels. A 60cm rendered stone wall — normal in Mallorca — can cost you 20 to 30dB, which in practical terms means most of your signal is gone after one wall and effectively all of it after two.
Reinforced concrete slabs are worse still, because the steel mesh inside behaves like a partial Faraday cage. This is why the signal in a Mallorcan villa often falls off vertically faster than horizontally, and why the room directly above the router can be worse than a room on the same floor twice as far away.
Modern villas aren't exempt. Dense block construction, thick concrete, and the metallic low-emissivity coatings on good glazing all attenuate heavily — that coating is excellent for keeping August out and equally excellent at keeping 5GHz in.
Why a more powerful router doesn't help
Two reasons, and the second is the one nobody mentions.
First, transmit power is legally capped, so there is no meaningfully more powerful router to buy. The premium devices differ in antenna design and processing, not in raw output.
Second, and more fundamentally, Wi-Fi is a two-way conversation. Even if a powerful router could shout far enough to reach your phone by the pool, your phone — running on a small battery with a tiny antenna — cannot shout back. You get the deeply frustrating situation of a device showing full bars and doing nothing, because it can hear the network perfectly and the network cannot hear it.
The mesh trap. Consumer mesh systems relay wirelessly between nodes. Each hop roughly halves throughput, and through stone the nodes often can't hear each other well enough to relay at all. Mesh works beautifully in a modern apartment and poorly in a Mallorcan villa — the exact environment people buy it for.
What actually fixes it
Access points with wired backhaul. This is the whole answer. Several access points, each with an Ethernet cable back to a central switch, so every one of them has full-speed connectivity regardless of what's between it and the others. Every other measure is a workaround for not having done this.
Placement based on measurement. A survey with actual measurement tells you where the dead zones are and what the walls are costing you. Guessing produces access points in corridors — convenient for cabling, useless for coverage.
Getting devices onto 5GHz or 6GHz where possible. The 2.4GHz band travels further through stone but is hopelessly congested on a hillside of villas. Many smart home devices are 2.4GHz only, which is exactly why the band needs to be kept clean rather than loaded with laptops and televisions.
Outbuildings on their own cable. Pool house, gate, guest cottage, garage. A buried Cat6 or fibre run, or where the ground genuinely can't be opened, a point-to-point wireless bridge with line of sight — which is a different technology from a mesh node and behaves far better.
Why this matters more than the smart home itself
Nine out of ten "my smart home is unreliable" calls I get turn out to be network faults. The automation is fine. The KNX is fine. The devices are fine. They're sitting on a foundation that drops them several times a day, and no amount of money spent above that layer will compensate.
If you're weighing a €5,000 network rebuild against €5,000 of new automation in an existing villa, the network wins every time and it isn't close. More on networks and Wi-Fi.
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Straight answers.
How many access points does a villa need?
Roughly one per 80–120m² of interior, more where walls are thick, plus dedicated coverage for terraces, pool areas and outbuildings. A 600m² villa with a garden typically needs five to eight. Anyone specifying two for that house has not measured anything.
Can I just use powerline adapters?
They can rescue a single stubborn outbuilding, but they're sensitive to how the property is wired and won't cross phases or separate consumer units, which large Mallorcan properties often have. Useful as a targeted fix, unsuitable as the basis of a design.
Does Wi-Fi 7 solve this?
It improves throughput and congestion handling, but it does not change the physics of stone. A Wi-Fi 7 access point in the wrong place, fed wirelessly, will still fail. The topology matters far more than the generation.
Will fibre to the house fix it?
No. Fibre improves the connection between your property and the internet. Every problem described here is inside the property. A gigabit line into a bad internal network gives you a fast route to a bottleneck.