Best location for router and extender

I have a router in the basement and a an extender on the main level in the den next to the garage. There are cameras inside and outside the home. The cameras in the back yard are in the yard from 20-40ft away from the home. There's 2 ppl working from home on teams and another "taking classes" but really streaming movies, YouTube and gaming all day.

There are 6 smart tvs and at least 2 of them are on most of the day and sometimes 3. Streaming tv gets pixelated a lot and the camera feeds outside are hit or miss. I'm not sure if it's the placement of the devices or the bandwidth isn't good enough.

If the issue is placement, it would probably mean we need another extender located at the back of the house. Since the only thing wired are the 3 desktops on the upper level, maybe putting the router up there rather than in the basement would help but I'm building a gaming PC for the basement.

Although the router is in the basement, I have a cat5/6 going from that to the upper level to a hub which supports the 3 desktops and 2 IoT hubs.

How do I get better performance from the internet/wifi?

Accepted answers

Cang_Household

You won't get any good coverage with WiFi.

In a commercial setting, you would find wireless access points in every room. This is not economically feasible in residential settings.

For outdoor cameras, the majority of the mid-atlantic region houses have metal-plated siding material to reflect heat, which also reflects wireless radios. I learned this the hard way and ended up pulling Ethernet wires to all cameras.

Smart TVs should still have a 10/100 Ethernet port for hardwiring too.

If you have a CAT5e wire coming from the basement, you can relocate the router to the main floors. The argument against it if you also have coaxial TV service and the house is not wired for Coax in each room.

All comments

Cang_Household

You won't get any good coverage with WiFi.

In a commercial setting, you would find wireless access points in every room. This is not economically feasible in residential settings.

Smart TVs should still have a 10/100 Ethernet port for hardwiring too.

DMVRob

I found some extenders that are supposed to work outside. Would I be able to connect them to my network or does Vz somehow prevent this so that you have to only use their products? I would assume it would connect like any other network device, I just wouldn't be able to manage it via the vz portal, right?

My thought is to set that right outside of the home to assist the devices in the yard (cameras, lights, speakers, projector, etc).

Cang_Household

No. Ethernet and WiFi radios from VZ routers are all standard.

Devices connected off the standalone access point could be discovered by the VZ router, which subsequently could be managed by the router and the corresponding app. I do not recommend using the app as that adds overhead in terms of reliability. Anything viewable in the app is viewable on the router.