Is it even worth the hassle to update my LAN with a slow ISP?

So, right now I live in a rural area, Verizon DSL is only available because we're grandfathered in, and provisioned at a whopping 3360 down/864 up (kbps). I've got an RT-N16 and it works well enough, as in we can pick it up in the rooms in the house that we need to. However, it's not great in one of the bathrooms, nor a bedroom (that's currently a "guest" room).

I've been floating back and forth between either
1. Not doing anything until some faster/more reliable ISP services the area;
2. Wireless mesh, since we have no neighbors, there's basically no signal congestion, and it's arguably the easiest way to get strong signal across the house, with the added benefit of maybe even covering the yard, or parts of it.
3. Running hardlines. If I went this route, because I'm weird, I'd prefer Cat6 or higher, S/UTP, CMP rated, and it'd be awesome if it could somehow be direct burial too... I have a Ubiquiti EdgeRouter X I haven't bothered touching (picked it up since it can be configured to act as dual-wan if I ever found another service that could augment the DSL), so I'd probably use that to a switch and then throw around a few of their access points.

Thing is, my wife doesn't really dig the idea of me poking holes and shoving things in the walls of the house she grew up in. So I'm inclined toward mesh, and have been eyeballing the Amplifi Mesh Gamer's Edition (I dig the color and like the QoS, even if it's useless for me at the moment).

Having a strong backhaul, even with a weak ISP, still gives options like streaming from device to device, but I don't currently bother with those sorts of things (ie like a NAS). I might at some point though.

Should I just hold off until our connection to the outside world upgrades and address it then, or should I go nuts and pimp out house in prep for when/if we ever get something of mediocre speeds? If the latter, would you wire it up, or just do mesh if you know there's no neighbors to deal with? And if you went mesh, would you pick something other than the direction I'm leaning? Why?

Anyway, thank yall for reading, and replying.

 

I wouldn't go whole hog on upgrading your entire house unless you have near certainty that your area is being upgraded with faster speeds. Would power line Ethernet be an option as a stopgap? This way you can get wired connections without needing to drill into your walls.

 

For people in rural areas satellite Internet Service is an option but it's very expensive and has a high latency.If you are an online gamer this is not a good option

No matter how good your hardware is your Internet speed will be limited to the service you receive,the sites you are connecting to plus time and day.

Home network file transfers/sharing between connected devices is the main advantage of updating to the newest Ethernet and WiFi protocals

 

I went to a county commissioner meeting about a month ago. I know my county made a "Broadband Task Force" since we're basically within an hour of Washington DC and yet a large percentage of the county has nothing, or it's like... "my neighbor has gigabit FiOS, but we have nothing." They're looking to find a way to subsidize it I guess, since there's no real cost incentive for ISP's to roll out into sparsely populated areas.

I looked into powerline stuff, but honestly, the wiring in my house is *old.* Like.... I'm fairly positive we have the old bare copper, knob and tube stuff in some parts of the house. That's another issue I'm dealing with regarding running my own lines - some of the walls are drywall, which is easy to work with. Others are lathe and plaster, which is just awful.

Believe me mate, I'm familiar with latency. HughesNet is available in the area (so long as you clear out the trees) but I'm not going to deal with that much delay. I was basically seeing if anyone could convince me one way or another as to whether or not intranet tinkering was worth the expense. Well, that and I'm curious if anyone has experience with Ubiquiti Mesh Gamer's Edition and could either speak for or against it, or provide other ideas that are really good mesh systems that have a lot of personalization/interoperability/etc. Or convince me that despite having a basically free spectrum I should still avoid mesh and go wired.