I'm fed up with my prese t system of wifi extenders and a thinking about a mesh system. I don't need high speed for gaming etc so do I need to go for the more expensive tri band offers or would dual band AC1200 be ok. The BT mini looks adequate but are there any catches?
Might not CAT5 cable be cheaper?
not easy to run a tablet from CAT5
cat5 from router to additional APs ...
well there you go. ditch the tablet!
Only a fool would do that when its so easy and cheap to put an access point on the CAT5.
The sort of fool who is too stupid to even answer an incoming call on a mobile phone.
Cat 6 shielded is generally available for very little more than 5E and is what I'd go for at present.
I use the BT variant. It isn't perfect but it has saved me running wires or using multiple access points. UNTIL I wanted to plug in a TV without wireless (old one) which was away from the mesh hardware. Then I remembered an old access point which has 4 ethernet points so I connected that and wired the TV to it. Works!
USB-C to ethernet adapters are avilable.
I picked up a Belkin F2CU040 cheap in Aldi, my Nokia 6.1 "see's" it under "Connected Devices" but says "Charging connected device". The "USB Controlled by" is "connected device" and can't be switched. All the "Use USB for" options (File TRansfer, USB tethering, MIDI, PTP, No data Transfer) are all greyed out. B-(
The lights on the switch port come on when connected to the adapter. So it's sort of talking.
A click-bait title...
You can see in their pictures, they're showing how backhaul is "mixed in" with the regular usage on two-band.
A tri-band has 2.4Ghz, 5GHz, and a second 5GHz, and the backhaul is on the second one. Some of the channels in 5GHz-country, are radar-sensitive - if a radar is transmitting on that channel, the router must stop using the channel. The mesh devices would communicate with one another, what channels are available. There is one section of the first 5GHz, that works regardless. Other parts of the band plan are multi-use, with existing band users having priority (radar). And this theme has been consistent over the years - the radios back off to "Safe" operating modes, depending on what is sensed in the environment. Someone on a farm in the wilderness, is the only person to ever see "whizzy Wifi rates". If the device has an 80MHz channel capability, with no legacy equipment present, the farm gets excellent rates. If you're in an apartment building, with many Wifi routers around you, all you'll get is 802.11N rates.
You'll notice that a lot of the articles on this site, are shameless plugs for product. The Orbi line here, might have been one of the first mesh products to be working. The firmware in the initial releases by competitors were rather bad/sad (situations where backhaul was affecting fronthaul with embarrassingly bad thruput).
Paul
I have friends who speak well of the Tenda MW3, but I have no personal experience. I'm tempted to make the change to a mesh system so will watch this thread with interest.
Kind of defeats the object though.
IME dual band is ok. Mesh has managed to get wifi into places that it would not perform well in the past. The TP-Link DECO stuff seems reasonable and is easy to setup. They also do some that can use homeplug backhaul.
There is an object?
Corse there is, a convenient and very portable way to do stuff.
I've had one of those for about 6 months - very pleased with it. The cheaper units are far from bleeding edge wifi speeds, but for my purposes all the wifi devices (cameras, TV, phones etc) seem a lot snappier than my old repurposed router solution.
Be aware that if you do go to mesh and a highish power one, your neighbour might be banging on your door saying they cannot connect to their wifi. I've seen this effect many times and its perfectly obvious that the two bands are getting full now. I think if its possible use wired connections, though of course smart speakers etc, do not have sockets. My Samsung tv still has connection issues at times and it is only four feet from the router! I feel an extension net cable coming along in my future. Brian
I bought a three-pack Deco P9 kit and a lot of my issues went away overnight - freezing up on Zoom chats, dropping out when streaming iPlayer, general poor Internet performance. I've had to reboot it once in six months because thery stopped talking to each other, otherwise it's been 'plug and forget'. My modem/router has WiFi disabled but still runs DHCP and the mesh nodes are simply access points.
What has hapened is that my Hive thermostat now won't work if it gets too far from the Hive hub, because although Hive uses WiFi frequencies, it uses a different protocol and the mesh system must be swamping the Hive signals.
The problem with multiple access points is that if you move around roaming between them is a total pain. Devices seem to "stick" on a slow AP. Total Pain.
Dave
Assuming that Cat5 is not possible, then mesh is a good way of getting the coverage.
We've got Linksys Velop devices, and we need 5 to cover an L-shaped house (mostly single storey, with one end two-storey) where the phone point and router is at one end of an arm of the L. Some of the house is pre-1900s and may have thicker walls. The modern part is brick with windows that may have heat-reflective glass that tens to attenuate wifi.
Our experience is that they work well, but they are a real bugger if there is a power cut, because it's necessary to turn the devices on in a specific order: if they are all turned on simultaneously when the power comes back, some nodes fail to connect - and then nodes which depend on them fail to connect...
The problem with our devices is that they use 5 GHz for the node-to-node communications, but we need them to use 2.4 GHz as well to run devices that have no 5 GHz access point (security cameras, an older laptop). This means that you position the nodes so they are just within 5 GHz range of each other, but this is so close that the 2.4 GHz networks from all the nodes interfere with each other and it's difficult for the auto-channel selection on 2.4 to find non-interfering channels. I feel a bit guilty that our house uses the whole range of non-overlapping 2.4 channels 1, 6, 11.
If we didn't need 2.4, I'd turn it off and there wouldn't be a problem. But there would be a greater chance of dead zones due to the shorter range of 5 GHz.
The aim with mesh is to have the nodes (if possible) so several all take to one central parent node, rather than having a daisy-chain where A can see B and B can see C but A can't see C. I've positioned the parent node (connected by Ethernet to the router) where it has best line of site of all the other nodes so *usually* all the nodes connect to the parent one rather than in a line to each other. There doesn't seem to be any difference in speed between the two configurations, but all-to-parent seems to give greater chance that the nodes will re-connect automatically after a power-cut.
I had considered Cat 5 along the two arms of the L, maybe with simple access points to cover the bedrooms which are at the opposite end of the L to the router. However getting into the loft is not easy and there are breezeblock firebreaks which I'd have to drill through to get the Cat 5 through. It would almost be easier to take the Cat 5 outside, run it round near the gutters and back in again :-) Almost!
HomeOwnersHub website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.