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Our wifi is a bit crap! We get incoming speeds of around 50-60mbs but often struggle in parts of the house and outside in my garden office.
I think the TP Link 3 box systems will help but I'm torn between the S4 and the P9.
The P9 is 50 quid more and claims to overcome the problems with signal not getting through walls but our hosue is modern with pretty thin walls anyway! I think the P9 uses the house power lines as well?
Will the S4 be good enough? 4 bed house and would be looking at one box in lounge, one upstairs and one in the office outside.
It also says that these things have ethernet ports - not sure I understand what difference that makes if the box is still reliant on a wifi signal from the router?
No idea about TP Link but I've been using 3 Google WiFi units in a large house with proper walls for about 3 years and it's been basically faultless.
Black Friday deal here
https://store.google.com/gb/config/google_wifi?hl=en-GB
not sure I understand what difference that makes if the box is still reliant on a wifi signal from the router?
Basically means you can hardwire {a non-wifi, but ethernet equipped} something directly into the mesh unit.
(Google does the same)
The wired connection helps. Your laptop talks to the box, then the box talks to the next box, and so on, until the last box talks to the router. If you're using just wifi, this means half the wifi capacity is the box talking to the incoming thing (your laptop or another box) and half talking to the next box in the chain. This is known as the backhaul. If you use the wired backhaul then all the wifi is used to connect to the laptop, and it's likely that a wired connection will be faster than wifi. For just one or two devices, you probably won't notice the difference but as the load increases, the wired backhaul will help
https://www.mbreviews.com/tenda-nova-mw3-wifi-system-review/2/
Two of out 3 Mesh discs are wired backhaul, one cat5 and the other over powerline. Just improves speed.
No idea about TP Link but I’ve been using 3 Google WiFi units in a large house with proper walls for about 3 years and it’s been basically faultless.
Year and a half here, but same experience. Idiot-proof set up means it's less configurable than other options, but it Just Works (tm). The extenders also work as Google Home speakers, which of course means Google is listening to you all the time, but you can use them to listen to Spotify / order pizza / etc.
This is known as the backhaul. If you use the wired backhaul then all the wifi is used to connect to the laptop, and it’s likely that a wired connection will be faster than wifi
Just because there an Ethernet port is no guarantee of wired backhaul.... I'd check if that's important to you.
The wired connection helps. Your laptop talks to the box, then the box talks to the next box, and so on, until the last box talks to the router. If you’re using just wifi, this means half the wifi capacity is the box talking to the incoming thing (your laptop or another box) and half talking to the next box in the chain. This is known as the backhaul.
This is not really true anymore, proper wifi 6 meshes have their backhaul on a dedicated channel seperate from the WiFi channel going to clients.
True, it depends what mesh system you get. Can check though whether what you're planning to buy has a dedicated wi-fi backhaul or supports wired backhaul
I bought the TP-Link M4 when I had signal strength issues in one room. Difference was night and day (large, old, 3 bed house). Signal strength basically went from poor to 100%. Not really sure how the M4 differs from the S4.
proper wifi 6 meshes have their backhaul on a dedicated channel seperate from the WiFi channel going to clients.
In practice or theory? If you can site each unit in decent backhaul range, then you're in interference range for the client-serving signals. If you're in any situation with possible channel congestion from your neighbours, interference is always the limiting factor and thinking you can hog channels and turn the gain up is just an arms race.
This isn't everyone though. If your neighbours don't interfere, you can probably be a radio bandwidth whore as much as you like. In these cases triple channel and wireless backhaul may see you right. Inferior to wired "done right" but adequate and maybe even better than anything you've experienced before without the aggro of sending wires through the house.
I've done wired in two houses (original BT Whole home and TP_link Omada) and they have been one and done experiences; no maintenance necessary after initial install. The Omada stuff is brilliant with VLAN segregated SSIDs keeping my IOT traffic in a little walled garden and away from spying on my network.
Thanks all, the backhaul stuff is a school day for me!
Apologies, one more question. We've just had fibre cables laid in the street and will switch over when available - will the systems that I have mentioned be OK for this i.e. will they allow me to use the full speed of the new connection? Guessing here - but maybe 300mbs
I got a TP link set up, the cheaper on you listed I think. It seems to work well. I've only put two of the units in so far.
Had a Deco M5 for 4 years and it's been faultless. Have an older place with thick walls, so needed 5 units in the end.
I've always assumed not having a backhaul explains why the speed drops if I get more than one unit away from the base unit? I get the full 70/20 Mbps in the house, but it drops to half that when in the workshops/garden.
If you really want to future-proof for fibre and Gbps speeds it gets expensive with WiFi 6/802.11ax etc. But what you're looking at should be fine for 300Mbps.