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Hi all, just wondering if any home networking experts can share their advice?
I’ve used a Google WiFi (wifi5) mesh network for around 10 years. I did have four pucks but one died and the coverage isn’t great in the garden anymore now I’m down to 3
I found a few pucks second hand for £20, then realised I could buy a second hand Nest for £40 to use as the router and free up a WiFi puck for the back garden. This would likely give a modest speed boost
i then realised how out of date that tech is and started looking at wifi6/7 stuff, which can obviously get quite spendy!
we have the basic VM 300mbps service.
our main use is streaming movies and music, not much gaming. My daughter is at an age where we’re letting her use a tablet more, so the 30mbps in some rooms might get a bit limiting
i looked at second hard Eeros 6 units as they’re quite cheap on eBay but it seems a lot are ISP-linked and can be bricked by the ISP with no warning!
im thinking of a basic Wifi6 setup from TP link, as they seem more straightforward to setup than Asus. Two or three mesh units should give me a bit more speed and better WiFi coverage/range?
I'm just sending a set of Eero 7 back to Amazon as they wouldn't accept the configuration for my PPPoE / Fibre ONT setup - which is presumably pretty much the same as anyone with openreach-installed FTTP.
Really poor user interface / setup process. So I'd say, anything but Eero.
(For anyone interested - following the steps in the setup app results in getting stuck at a stage saying network connection failure with no option to enter any configuration. Alternative steps from support doesn't give an error - but ignores anything you enter and returns to default settings).
Edit to say - looking at TP-Link at the moment but need a refund from Amazon before getting them to play with.
Watching with interest as I have a Draytek mesh setup which seems to either be terminally unreliable, or leave a dead zone in the kids’ playroom (of course what I should really do is bring the internet into the house in the living room and wall-mount the router behind the sofa…)
I remember the Eero range being launched. What they're like now I don't know, but there was a lot of teething problems with them.
My daughter is at an age where we’re letting her use a tablet more, so the 30mbps in some rooms might get a bit limiting
30Mbps is sufficient for streaming 4k.
We have TP Linkt Decco, and it works well. We are not experts by any means, and I find it user friendly. Router plus three units. Will buy another when our extension is finished.
plus I hear there’s a waterproof outdoor unit I may consider
Can you run Ethernet backhaul to each point? That’ll make a big difference. Otherwise you need a tri-band setup which uses a separate radio to communicate between the nodes, because without that you need to assume that half your bandwidth is gone.
I bought some cheap Zyxel commercial access points from Amazon which are doing the job well. You might find that a very good router is better than multiple mesh points scattered around, though. I was surprised that the Wifi6 connection between my phone and the boring ISP router was faster than the wired access points (also WiFi 6, but not as many antennas).
We've had TP Deco's for about three years. Our internet connection is a somewhat ridiculous 900mb. We ended up with a bit of a mixed set which wasn't ideal as the cheaper ones had lower backhaul speeds (on wifi). We needed a 1 gig port on the one connected to the internet connection and my MacBook can get close to 800 meg according to speedtest.
We have six (as we have a funny shaped house with thick old walls), and just one ethernet backhaul to my office in the garden. Using the lower spec ones at the "edge" we still get 500 meg+ No real need to connect the others via cable which would have been a horrendous project.
Anyway the Deco's seem pretty solid. UI/App is okay. We do pay for the enhanced security as it was on offer for £50 or something but might not review at full price.
We have a bunch of Eero 7’s, which replaced an old router & various extenders which didn’t like each other over time.
As a tech simpleton they were super easy to set up & everything works as I would expect it to.
Thanks everyone
wired backhaul would need power lines, which adds a layer of complexity and plug sockets!
Am watching with interest. There doesn't seem a perfect system out there. Was looking at a Ubiquiti but I'm not very IT literate and it was too complicated. The Asus Zen 7 looked perfect but then found it doesn't integrate well with Sonos. (anybody any experience) I'm just going to give up and go back to dial up!!!
Repeating what's been said before, but for me it's Deco pucks (3-pack of X55s, plus some M4s picked up cheap from CEX). Key thing is wired backhaul - using ethernet to connect all the pucks to each other, meaning 1Gb from the puck to the router, then 300Mb (or whatever) internet.
We live in a big old house (12" thick walls between rooms), but this gives us great wifi coverage, and it extends to the shed out the back too.
Just embarking on this mission myself as our powerline adaptors are getting increasingly flakey, and won't do the garage (other end of the garden) at all any more. Wanted a mesh system as we have stone walls and terrible wifi, but the price has always put me off. I've been pointed at a set of Mercusys Halo mesh adaptors (TP-links budget brand) and just ordered a set of 3 H80X which is £130 and worth taking a chance on, I reckon. Hopefully, running them all on ethernet cable upstairs will let me jump the signal past the stone walls and maybe even reach the garage, fingers crossed. I'd buy another node to sit in the garage, if the signal will make it to the window...
We've got TP Link Decos (S4 model). We have 3 "coffee cans" as they're nicknamed here. We bought them during COVID when the load of four of us at home was crashing the ISP router daily.
Super easy to use, UI in the control app is pretty decent, good controls etc.
No wired back haul or anything "complicated", although we have modest devices (no smart house stuff) just phones, TV, Xbox, laptops (usual family of four with teens load).
It knocked the old ISP router into a cocked hat and after a supplier change today the brand new supplied (Linksys) router has gone back in the box within hours and the Decos are back on front line duty.
I've nothing to compare to in terms of other Mesh units but low fuss and good/consistent Internet performance.
Deco x60 here. I faffed around with various cheaper stuff and eventually gave up and put this in and it's been great ever since. I tried ethernet back haul just with a massive cable run up the stairs or out to garden office but it was fast enough without that I decided not to go to the effort of putting it in properly.
looking at a Ubiquiti but I'm not very IT literate and it was too complicated
There's a raft of third party video support on YouTube plus the console has a helpful search function. The search is necessary as Unifi change how things are displayed regularly. The Ad Blocking is still a work in progress but putting all the IoT stuff into their own VLAN while allowing access from the devices in the secure area was very easy.
Ubiquiti unifi here - don’t be put off by the perceived complexity, it’s more that there’s so much capability to do clever stuff but setting up basic reliable wifi is more or less out of the box (getting your virgin box into modem mode and choosing the right Ethernet port to connect to is about the hardest bit)
once you’re up and running, you then have the ability to add just the right components to solve the specific problems your house and useage present rather than guessing and buying loads of kit
Is the Ubiquiti (looking at DR7) a standalone router with excellent range, or will I likely need an AP or two to ensure full-house coverage? My house is approx 2000sqft with solid block internal walls upstairs and down
price wise it would be good if standalone but adding an AP or two takes the price well past Deco and I doubt I need the advanced features.
Dream routers were unobtainium when I built my network so I have no experience of them. But yes, DR has a built in access point. Whether it covers your whole house will depend where you place it.
my house is 3500 ft2 and has a fairly complex construction with a lot of steel (extended house) so was always a nightmare to get good coverage
I’m running a cloud gateway as the router with an AP in the loft and an AP in the middle of the ground floor (on the ceiling). I’ve added another AP in my office as a belt and braces approach as I was getting yellow signal quality in there rather than green elsewhere but honestly that was a want more than a need.
for me, the benefit is being confident that whatever your needs, you’ll always be able to solve it without starting over with another platform
I have a tplink Omada system in my very odd shaped house house (ER605 and then three APs). Got fed up with the poor device handovers from the old linksys mesh system I have plus loads of deadspots. The Omada stuff is great - now I get 300mb/s download (this is my internet speed, i've never bother to measure the internal network speed) over every inch of my house. Can do vlans and whatnot pretty easily as well. I've got a dedicated controller for it (aka a raspberry pi) but I did have it running off my phone to start with and it was pretty straightforward for a business class setup. Would recommend. Cheaper than Ubiquiti as well.
hidden bonus of Chinese govt backdoors as with all TP-Link stuff too of course 🤣
Tying myself in knots with this now!
am I right in saying WiFi 6E adds a new 6ghz band to the 2.4 and 5 bands, but often this is at the expense of decent wireless backhaul? Plus hardly any devices have 6ghz connectivity yet
most of the things I’m reading suggest getting a tri-band 4 antenna WiFi 6 ‘non-E router with 2.4, 5, 5 and then one of the 5ghz bands can act as the back haul
Sounds about right. If I enable WiFi6 on my Decos, I get a warning that it'll affect the wifi backhaul.
All of my IOT stuff is on the 2.4 band so I can firewall it off from the Internet. A lot of it won't run on a 5ghz channel anyway.
Even on our less powerful decos, we still get 350meg+ from phones/laptops. I've not researched wifi6 at all, but I just can't see any benefit. If I can stream 4k on our big TV (which is about a 25 meg from memory) then that's good enough. So plenty of headroom on existing 5Ghz.
Just embarking on this mission myself as our powerline adaptors are getting increasingly flakey, and won't do the garage (other end of the garden) at all any more. Wanted a mesh system as we have stone walls and terrible wifi, but the price has always put me off. I've been pointed at a set of Mercusys Halo mesh adaptors (TP-links budget brand) and just ordered a set of 3 H80X which is £130 and worth taking a chance on, I reckon. Hopefully, running them all on ethernet cable upstairs will let me jump the signal past the stone walls and maybe even reach the garage, fingers crossed. I'd buy another node to sit in the garage, if the signal will make it to the window...
Bought, set-up, happy.
I did run cable between them and my computer downstairs now has a faster connection on wi-fi than it did when cabled to a powerline adaptor. The garage now gets enough signal for me to place an old repeater/extender in the window and get decent coverage/speed down there, too (although it's on a different SSID which is no problem). I was quite pleasently surprised at how easy it all was to set up, too.
I'm sure there are many better solutions available, but this is working well for a simple home system at a very low price 🙂
Wahey, nice work. Honestly that's the magic of mesh I guess - when you get it set up and it just *works*. No more switching between networks as you move around the house, blackspots etc. And IME you can later add on extra adapters as necessary, to cover any blackspots, extend to other parts of the house etc.