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My brother is in search of a mesh to install in his house in order to even out and enhance the WiFi.
It's a big house. Like Victorian mansion-sized.
Considering they're fairly dear to purchase, does anyone have experience of/knowledge of a system they would recommend?
It depends if you just want max coverage or if you want more "advanced" features built in to the hardware. I went with Synology rt2600ac and the satellites MR2200. The setup has been faultless but it wasn't the cheapest option. The google mesh units are well reviewed if you just want basic but extensive coverage.
Also, I know this is somewhat obvious, but distance is often not the issue. It's the material through which the signal has to pass. Concrete is particularly bad for wifi signal in my experience.
When I did my research the Orbi came out tops...
I’ve ran it for a while with no real issues....
Tends (MW03 I think) here. We don't live in a mansion but we now get full signal at the bottom of the garden and everywhere in the house. Unlike the extender that it replaced there's no desperately holding on to a rubbish signal nor the blips when it moves from one connection to another.
For actual mansion, I'd want to go for something with cabled APs. I'd not want to have to bounce through two or three APs to get back to the router.
I got the latest Google Mesh earlier this summer to sort out the wifi in my (not huge) house, and I'm very pleased with it. Apparently other models offer more configuration options, but as I was pretty sure my house / needs were bog-standard I (rightly) assumed I wouldn't need any extra flexibility.
Google mesh for me - works great
Tenda Nova el-cheapo model works in my ancient house with thick stone walls. £70 for free. It’s not super fast but is very consistent. Delivers 80 mbits across the whole house.
Bargain basement Tenda here too. 8 posts in and no-one has yet mentioned backhaul capability.
#thisplaceisslipping
Bargain basement BT system (3 mini disks for the price of 2) has worked fine for us & gives coverage all over the house, garage and garden. We're pretty basic users and don't have multiple people streaming, gaming and uploading all at the same time.
Another Tenda Nova MW3 user.
I bought 6 boxes for my Victorian mansion. It works flawlessly but I understand it's limited in speed if you have ultra fast fibre. I have shitey council broadband so it's all gravy.
I have google mesh and it works great although the signal penetration through the walls isn't the strongest. Some of my walls are made from several foot thick rocks though so Im guessing anything could struggle a touch.
Tenda MW6 here, works very well.
We have the basic BT system with 5 nodes (nodes?), but run it cabled. 5 internet users on Zoom / youtube / whatever no problem. Each dish does a big area through thick walls.
If he can't run it cabled I'd suggest the BT 'Pro' (or something like that) model which has a separate wifi channel for backhaul so you keep full bandwidth coming into your devices.
Its ace and I'm sorry I persevered with routers as AP and all that for so long!
I tried BT Whole Home when we did the work in our house...it worked but wasn't great, kept getting drop outs. Also it felt a bit wrong having 5 powered units around the house consuming a lot of power.
Thankfully i decided to send it back and got for 2 wired access points (from Ubiquiti) which I connect back into the router which is now under the stairs. Coverage is now great and it has been incredibly stable in the year or so its been running.
As a side topic; I have decent enough signal according to my mobile, but my streaming speakers (MusicCast) complain of weaker signal at times. House isn't massive (2 bed semi), but it does have block built rather than partition walls. I'm interested to know if a mesh would/might help with this, any ideas?
We've gone for an Orbi solution which has been faultless. Any solution that you go for may need to allow for cabled backhaul (i.e. link the nodes together with physical cable). With Orbi (and other Mesh) providers you can keep adding nodes as required. Not cheap though
Just installed a TP-Link Deco S4 system with 3 units. It is perfect for our requirements - long house with thick stone walls and the phone line comes into the house at one end.
It was incredibly simple to set up and a bit more affordable than many of the other options and the stations daisy chain to give coverage across a long building. The app is great and provides a bunch of useful network management tools as well as making the setup as simple as possible.
I have a Deco system with ethernet backhaul and recommend it.
As with most of these things, it's probably better to think about what you're trying to achieve....
mesh has two main advantages - the biggest is access point switching so it should always move your device to the strongest wi-fi signal, however if you're not moving round the house much or if your devices handle switching on their own this becomes much less of an issue
the second tends to be using a three way aerial setup so the 'backhaul' is managed on a separate 5GHz band to the actual wi-fi traffic, if you have a wired connection available (gigabit ethernet) between router points then this becomes redundant
it's still a fairly expensive solution compared to a wired lan backbone + routers setup but I'd probably go for it against wi-fi router + range extender / powerline solutions
Ive got a Tenda Nova MW4 kit, bought just efore they released teh 5 which has dedicated backhaul <angry>. Very simple to set up though and does cover the whole house. UI is not the best and trying to decifer waht each of the connected equipment is, is nigh on impossible.
I have got CAT6e all over the house - well i say i have it, the cables are run all over the house but my frustrations trying to terminate the cables has meant i can no longer be bothered even though i should.