Mesh WiFi - any experts on here

JonW

JonW

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3,262
After 3 weeks of crappy WiFi coverage, and the kids hogging all the bandwidth with their various streaming devices, I’ve decided I need to get out of the dark ages and stop relying on my old Sky home hub and a couple of TP-Link WiFi extenders.

I’ve been reading about mesh networks, and really like the idea of being able to cover my whole house with strong, fast WiFi, including the garden and garage...

So, is anyone in here clued up on these sorts of things?

I was thinking of ordering this one, https://www.tp-link.com/uk/home-networking/deco/deco-m9-plus/
 
Navcorr

Navcorr

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3,839
Got any old routers kicking about (BT, PlusNet, etc.)
They can easily be reconfigured to extend your main hub.
 
Wanderer

Wanderer

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5,791
I got a Tenda Mesh, about 150 quid forge place in Dublin, three nodes, improved things no end
 
rockits

rockits

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9,172
The Ubiquiti stuff is pretty decent a lower level before you start getting silly money. We use ZyXel or Ruckus on most customer sites. Ruckus is not cheap but good and the Unleashed stuff is hardware controller free. The ZyXEL and Ubiquiti stuff can be Cloud controller based.

The current standard short of WiFi 6 is 802.11ac and plenty decent enough for most home setups. Getting a dual radio 2.4Ghz/5Ghz can be useful as 5Ghz is less congested as 2.4Ghz can get congested depending on the environment.

We have a dedicated 3rd party resource for customer desktop and site wireless surveys and planning.

We out a Ruckus Unleashed setup in a Director house a while back as he wanted the best and not worried about cost. That was £5k I think supplied, installed and configured

Not up on any Netgear, Dlink or TPlink stuff.

Each AP will need an Ethernet cable run to it but can be PoE so needs no power. Playing around with range extenders and all that guff as futile IMHO.

Depends on your house layout and size of house but if you have some plans we can look and advice on best positioning for you. Drop me a PM if you like .
 
Gazcw

Gazcw

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7,763
Wanderer said:
I got a Tenda Mesh, about 150 quid forge place in Dublin, three nodes, improved things no end
Click to expand...
Ditto. Got it from Currys and it works well. My pc is hardwired to one of them. So at the moment there are 2 pc, 3 tv, 5 phones, Alexa x 3 and various other items all running without issue.
 
rockits

rockits

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9,172
JonW said:
After 3 weeks of crappy WiFi coverage, and the kids hogging all the bandwidth with their various streaming devices, I’ve decided I need to get out of the dark ages and stop relying on my old Sky home hub and a couple of TP-Link WiFi extenders.

I’ve been reading about mesh networks, and really like the idea of being able to cover my whole house with strong, fast WiFi, including the garden and garage...

So, is anyone in here clued up on these sorts of things?

I was thinking of ordering this one, https://www.tp-link.com/uk/home-networking/deco/deco-m9-plus/
Click to expand...

I'll take a look at this TPLink Deco set up as it might be OK. Just having a look.
 
rockits

rockits

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9,172
First things first......what speed is your Internet up and down?

Do you have any local home/file servers or are bouncing peer-to-peer data around the LAN? Or is it just purely Internet traffic?
 
M

mgtsroar

Junior Member
Messages
69
Mate .... I have just ordered a Google nest wi fi as was recommended this by Virgin media engineer when I complained about weak spots at the far end of our detached house. Will let u know how it goes when I get itA
 
rockits

rockits

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9,172
Last edited:
rockits

rockits

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9,172
It isn't always about flooding quantity over quality as you can cause more issues sometimes with more AP's than less. We did a survey for a large London university a few years back after their preferred supplier installed 300 AP's. They complained that it was worse than the old wireless network. After a full site survey our recommendation was to remove 150 AP's!
 
spkennyuk

spkennyuk

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5,959
JonW said:
After 3 weeks of crappy WiFi coverage, and the kids hogging all the bandwidth with their various streaming devices, I’ve decided I need to get out of the dark ages and stop relying on my old Sky home hub and a couple of TP-Link WiFi extenders.

I’ve been reading about mesh networks, and really like the idea of being able to cover my whole house with strong, fast WiFi, including the garden and garage...

So, is anyone in here clued up on these sorts of things?

I was thinking of ordering this one, https://www.tp-link.com/uk/home-networking/deco/deco-m9-plus/
Click to expand...

Do you have Sky Q as well as sky broadband ?

Couple of reasons i ask. If you have Sky Q the Q boxes can be used as wireless extenders / hotspots. They work purely on the 5G wifi signal so if you connect directly to them you should get a stronger cleaner signal.

2nd reason i ask is that the 5g signal from the sky hub is i believe reserved for the Sky Q boxes so they would get the fastest wifi stream. If you dont have Sky Q then i dont think your actually getting the 5g band. Your just accessing the 2.4g band.

Solution if its the later would be getting something like the netgear r800 night hawk. Its an ugly beast to be fair but it has some tricks in its tool box that help in situations like yours.

You can configure the R800 so that it allocates either the 2.4g or 5g signal to specific devices.

For example you could have your laptop, tablet , phone running off the 5G signal and everything else running from the 2.4g signal. That way your not sharing with anyone else.

You can also then reconfigure the old sky hub as an extender if you have issue in the furthest points of the house.

Any of the hubs the internet providers supply FOC are usually garbage anyway.

Sky also stop you using the 5g signal to connect your Sky Q boxes to your wifi hub if they dont supply your internet. Which to my mind is a restrictive business practice.
 
JonW

JonW

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3,262
rockits said:
First things first......what speed is your Internet up and down?

Do you have any local home/file servers or are bouncing peer-to-peer data around the LAN? Or is it just purely Internet traffic?
Click to expand...

Internet speed is pretty woeful, but that is hopefully about to improve a little bit as upgrading to the quicker Sky Superfast Broadband. Won’t be that quick even then, but given the COVID lockdown it‘s not possible to switch suppliers to one of the really quick cable broadband providers.

In terms of local home/file servers and peer to peer data bouncing around a LAN, I have no clue what that means, so I can’t have it... it’s just internet traffic, and me being able to connect and work seamlessly from home whilst the kids and wife are all streaming stuff due to either school work or Zoom/Teams/ Tiktok/PS4/etc...
 
JonW

JonW

Member
Messages
3,262
spkennyuk said:
Do you have Sky Q as well as sky broadband ?

Couple of reasons i ask. If you have Sky Q the Q boxes can be used as wireless extenders / hotspots. They work purely on the 5G wifi signal so if you connect directly to them you should get a stronger cleaner signal.

2nd reason i ask is that the 5g signal from the sky hub is i believe reserved for the Sky Q boxes so they would get the fastest wifi stream. If you dont have Sky Q then i dont think your actually getting the 5g band. Your just accessing the 2.4g band.

Solution if its the later would be getting something like the netgear r800 night hawk. Its an ugly beast to be fair but it has some tricks in its tool box that help in situations like yours.

You can configure the R800 so that it allocates either the 2.4g or 5g signal to specific devices.

For example you could have your laptop, tablet , phone running off the 5G signal and everything else running from the 2.4g signal. That way your not sharing with anyone else.

You can also then reconfigure the old sky hub as an extender if you have issue in the furthest points of the house.

Any of the hubs the internet providers supply FOC are usually garbage anyway.

Sky also stop you using the 5g signal to connect your Sky Q boxes to your wifi hub if they dont supply your internet. Which to my mind is a restrictive business practice.
Click to expand...

hi, this is really interesting....

Currently we don’t have Sky Q, and I had thought about going this route, but its apparently very hard to talk to Sky at the moment due to COVID, so I decided against it...

Once the lockdown is over I think I will need to pay someone who knows what they are doing to come and sort out our whole WiFi/TV/home entertainment set up, but for now I just need something really easy to set up.

Our house was refurbished / rebuilt about 5 hrs ago, and we have Cat6 cables wired to all three floors, so I’m hoping that if I stick one of the Mesh things on each floor, and connect each one with an Ethernet cable, that it will help, and at least make the best of what we have.

I will however also take a look at the R800... I like the idea of reserving all the fast signal for me, and letting the wife and kids have the slower one!
 
rockits

rockits

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9,172
JonW said:
Internet speed is pretty woeful, but that is hopefully about to improve a little bit as upgrading to the quicker Sky Superfast Broadband. Won’t be that quick even then, but given the COVID lockdown it‘s not possible to switch suppliers to one of the really quick cable broadband providers.

In terms of local home/file servers and peer to peer data bouncing around a LAN, I have no clue what that means, so I can’t have it... it’s just internet traffic, and me being able to connect and work seamlessly from home whilst the kids and wife are all streaming stuff due to either school work or Zoom/Teams/ Tiktok/PS4/etc...
Click to expand...

When you say the Internet speed is woeful have you got any rough figures to put to that. One persons woeful isn't always the others. If you can do a speed test when wired into the main router with everyone else disconnected that would give an ideal baseline. You can use speedtest.net to give you a download and upload figure.

It is great that you have a wired infrastructure as that is ideal. As you say you can put one AP per floor wired to a central backbone. If you had a small PoE switch at the main central cabling point you could eliminate the need for power supplies for each AP so a little neater maybe.

When you Internet speed is so bad organising some form of priority at the wireless level is a bit too late. It needs to be done at the router/source point. It is too late at the AP point. You can create a QoS (Quality of Service) on most kit these days and follow this through from router through switches and AP's to give certain traffic/devices higher priority over others.

PM me over your postcode and broadband telephone number and I'll check with some supplier tools what you can get and the max theoretical speeds.

We sometimes find speeds aren't what they should be at the router due to line faults or other issues. You need to get the best you can at source as everything else is downhill after this. If the speed is bad say 3Mbps but it should be 4Mbps and you can get it to 4Mbps it has a big impact. Obviously say improving it from 65Mbps to 67Mpbs isn't going to notice much.

Some suppliers were still doing upgrades from ADSL copper to FTTC fibre as they don't need to visit your premises anyway. It is just a quick change at the local exchange/green cabinet externally. We have just had a full 1Gbps Ethernet Fibre circuit installed at a customer site near Stansted Airport all OK.
 
JonW

JonW

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Messages
3,262
rockits said:
When you say the Internet speed is woeful have you got any rough figures to put to that. One persons woeful isn't always the others. If you can do a speed test when wired into the main router with everyone else disconnected that would give an ideal baseline. You can use speedtest.net to give you a download and upload figure.

It is great that you have a wired infrastructure as that is ideal. As you say you can put one AP per floor wired to a central backbone. If you had a small PoE switch at the main central cabling point you could eliminate the need for power supplies for each AP so a little neater maybe.

When you Internet speed is so bad organising some form of priority at the wireless level is a bit too late. It needs to be done at the router/source point. It is too late at the AP point. You can create a QoS (Quality of Service) on most kit these days and follow this through from router through switches and AP's to give certain traffic/devices higher priority over others.

PM me over your postcode and broadband telephone number and I'll check with some supplier tools what you can get and the max theoretical speeds.

We sometimes find speeds aren't what they should be at the router due to line faults or other issues. You need to get the best you can at source as everything else is downhill after this. If the speed is bad say 3Mbps but it should be 4Mbps and you can get it to 4Mbps it has a big impact. Obviously say improving it from 65Mbps to 67Mpbs isn't going to notice much.

Some suppliers were still doing upgrades from ADSL copper to FTTC fibre as they don't need to visit your premises anyway. It is just a quick change at the local exchange/green cabinet externally. We have just had a full 1Gbps Ethernet Fibre circuit installed at a customer site near Stansted Airport all OK.
Click to expand...

Thanks Dean - will PM you my postcode and broadband line number

Sky have confirmed they can do a switch from my current ADSL copper to FTTC fibre, and this should mean my download speed will switch from below 20Mb/s to between 60-70... Clearly, not quick, but should be better...
 
MarkMas

MarkMas

Chief pedant
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8,925
rockits said:
When you say the Internet speed is woeful have you got any rough figures to put to that. One persons woeful isn't always the others........

.... If the speed is bad say 3Mbps but it should be 4Mbps and you can get it to 4Mbps it has a big impact. Obviously say improving it from 65Mbps to 67Mpbs isn't going to notice much.
Click to expand...

True that. I get 3.5Mbps over copper, and so am paying for 4G that sometimes gives me 4, sometimes 6 and occasionally 12. When it works at all.
 
JonW

JonW

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3,262
PS - I've googled what a PoE switch is, and I don't have one... What I've currently got in terms of a switch is a Netgear Prosafe 8Port Gigabit switch (GS108 v3)....

In most cases my hardwired access point is next to a power socket, so is there any benefit in upgrading to a PoE switch? I’ve also just checked the cables, and they are Cat5e, rather than Cat 6
 
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Wanderer

Wanderer

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5,791
At my gaff in Wakey, we have FTTC 80/20 with some static public IP's, the FritzBox though a very good route couldn't handle routing for them so got the daddy of all home modem/routers, Draytek Vigor 2862LaC and whilst it solved my issue, we found the wifi suffering dropouts all the time.

So I changed the channel settings from automatic and picked some random ones and et voila, no issues since. Might be worth a try before you spend any money.
 
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