A Kapadokya Guesthouse Wi-Fi Fix That Survived Two Winters

The guesthouse in Ürgüp has stone walls about 70 cm thick, six rooms, and a router that lived on a shelf in the breakfast room. In January 2023 the owner sent me a photo of the router’s lights and a message that guests on the second floor could not load anything after 21:00. The ISP line was 35/6 Mbit/s ADSL, and the router was a seven-year-old TP-Link with 2.4 GHz only. I had stayed there twice, so I knew the layout: breakfast room on the ground floor, three rooms up a narrow staircase, three more in the back behind two stone arches.

What I did first was not buy equipment. I walked the building with a laptop and iw dev wlan0 scan every few meters, logging signal and channel. The 2.4 GHz band was crowded — I counted 14 other SSIDs, three of them on channel 6, one on channel 11 running at full power from a hotel across the street. The guesthouse router was also on channel 6. That alone explained the evening collapse: when everyone came back from tours and opened their phones, the contention got ugly.

I changed the router to channel 1 (the least occupied in my scan), set 20 MHz width instead of 40, and moved it from the shelf to a wall bracket about 2 m up, away from the stone corner. Then I added one cheap access point (a used TP-Link EAP225 I brought from Istanbul) wired over the existing ethernet run to the back rooms, with the same SSID but a different channel. The key command for checking after the change was:

for i in 1 2 3; do
  iw dev wlan0 scan | awk '/SSID|signal|freq/'
  sleep 2
done

I ran that from three rooms at 21:30, when the guests were back. Signal in the back rooms went from -78 dBm to around -58 dBm. Throughput on a speed test went from 2–4 Mbit/s to 18–25 Mbit/s in the evening.

The trade-off is real: I gave up 40 MHz width, so peak throughput on a quiet night is lower. But nobody is doing large transfers here; they are uploading photos and checking messages. Contention, not raw bandwidth, was the problem. The second AP also adds a device that can fail, and it is on a UPS only because the owner already had one for the breakfast fridge.

Where this fails: if the ISP line itself is saturated, none of this helps. In August 2023 the same guesthouse had a week of 1 Mbit/s evenings, and the fix was calling the ISP, not touching Wi-Fi. Also, channel 1 was clean in my scan but not necessarily in yours; a neighbor installing a new router can undo the choice. And the stone walls mean the back AP must be wired — a repeater would have halved throughput and probably not reached the far room. I have not tried mesh gear here, and I would not trust it through those walls without testing.

If you have run Wi-Fi in a cave hotel or an old stone building, what did you use to decide where to put the second AP — walk-test logs, a floor plan, or just trial and error?