"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 the neighbor's WiFi. A wired link gives you the full speed of your internet connection at every router, with latency you can ignore. If you can run cable, run cable. It is always the better backbone.

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.

How wireless backhaul works

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.

A true mesh takes this further: the routers discover each other and route traffic among themselves automatically, so if one path degrades, traffic finds another. For a community network, the practical upshot is that you can extend coverage into places a cable will never reach, and add a node by mounting it and powering it on.

Not all routers are equal

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

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

Getting this hierarchy wrong — two routers both running DHCP, both trying to be in charge — is a fast track to the kind of mysterious, intermittent disconnections that make you want to throw hardware out the window. One brain, many hands.

Use both

Most community networks end up using both approaches: cables where they can run them, mesh where they can't. The office and the room next door? Run a cable. The courtyard and the building across the way? Mesh. The key isn't picking a side — it's knowing which tool fits which obstacle, and keeping a single router clearly in charge of the addressing no matter how the links are made.