"Should I use cables or go wireless?"

You've got three routers now. One in the office, one for the classroom, one for the courtyard area. You've sorted out the IP addresses so they won't fight each other. But there's a question you've been avoiding: how do these routers actually talk to each other?

The textbook answer is simple — run Ethernet cables between them. Cables are fast, reliable, and don't care about interference from microwaves or neighboring WiFi networks. You'd love to use cables.

There's just one problem: the walls in this building are half a meter of solid concrete, built decades ago with no thought for network infrastructure. The building administrator takes one look at your drill and says absolutely not. Even if you could drill, the courtyard sits between the office and the classroom block — and burying a cable through a dirt courtyard that floods every rainy season sounds like a project for next year, not this week.

So you start looking into the alternative: mesh networking.

The idea is beautifully simple. Instead of connecting your routers with physical cables, they connect to each other over WiFi — forming a wireless backbone called a backhaul. A student in the classroom loads a webpage, the request hops wirelessly from the classroom router to the office router, and from there out to the internet. No cables, no drilling, no trenches.

There's one more thing to understand. When you add routers to extend your network this way, they aren't all equals:

• One router is the boss — the one connected to the internet. It hands out IP addresses, manages the connection, runs the show.
• The others run in "dumb AP" mode — they extend WiFi coverage and forward traffic back to the main router, but they don't try to manage the network themselves.

Getting this hierarchy wrong — two routers both trying to be in charge — is a fast track to the kind of mysterious disconnections that make you want to throw hardware out the window.

Most community networks end up using both approaches: cables where they can run them, mesh where they can't. The key is knowing which tool fits which situation.