Moving is exhausting. But the part that actually stresses me out isn't packing or dealing with the landlord — it's getting the internet working properly in a new place. Last month I moved into a new apartment and spent an embarrassingly long weekend getting everything set up the way I like it.
The apartment came with a basic router from the ISP. It technically works, but the signal barely reaches the bedroom and there's no real control over anything. I've been through this enough times to know the ISP router is going straight into a box in the closet.
The ISP provides a fiber connection with a wall socket in the living room. I already owned a TP-Link router from my last place, so the goal was to put the ISP modem into bridge mode and let my own router handle everything from there.
Bridge mode basically turns the ISP device into a dumb passthrough — it stops doing NAT, DHCP, WiFi, all of that, and just forwards the raw connection to your own router. Some ISPs make this easy, some make it deliberately annoying. Mine required a phone call, which took about 40 minutes including hold time.
The bedroom is about 12 meters from the living room with two walls in between. WiFi at that distance through concrete is hit or miss. I decided to run an ethernet cable along the baseboard rather than fight with WiFi range extenders, which I've found to be more trouble than they're worth.
It took about two hours, a lot of cable clips, and some creative routing around door frames. But now the desk in the bedroom gets a wired connection and it's completely stable. The difference compared to WiFi is noticeable for anything that requires consistent throughput.
I set the router's DNS to use a third-party resolver instead of the ISP default. ISP DNS tends to be slower and some of them do things with your queries I'd rather they didn't. I've been using the same resolver for a few years and it's been fine.
The other thing I always do on a new network is set up a guest WiFi network for phones and IoT devices. Keeps them off the main LAN where my computers are. Probably overkill for a one-person apartment but it's a habit at this point.
It took most of a weekend but the result is a network that actually works the way I want it to. Wired where it matters, decent WiFi coverage everywhere else, and I'm not dependent on whatever the ISP decides to do with their equipment.
If you're moving and dreading the network setup: just budget a full day for it. It always takes longer than expected, but it's worth doing right instead of just accepting whatever the ISP gives you.