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/
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.