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forum
Mesh wifi
TL;DR - if I pay our ISP for a 75Mb full fibre package, what wifi mesh speed do I need?
Our house has a couple of wifi deadspots (including, inconveniently, my preferred work from home spot) so I've been looking at getting a mesh wifi setup to improve the coverage - something like a TP Link Deco X50 which is wifi6 with speeds up to 3Gbps.
Only after falling down rabbit holes reading about the benefits of wired backhaul* did it occur to me to question what speed our ISP connection is, and therefore whether this is all academic. So, if I'm only paying the ISP for a 75Mb connection, does it make any difference if my mesh wifi speed is 1800, 3000, or 5400 mbps, or are they all perfectly adequate for our connection?
* aside - installing wires to improve your wireless network strikes me as the networking equivalent of improving your tubeless tyres by installing tubeless inserts.
If you're new please join in and if you have questions pop them below and the forum regulars will answer as best we can.
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14 comments
Mesh every time if you value your free time.
I have ethernet cables to most of the rooms in the house, but barely use them and halted my cabling half finished. (Mrs Squirrel loves me!)
Everytime I come across a bandwidth problem I just whack a new Deco M5 in. They work out about £50 a unit, and work within seconds.
Of my 6 M5's only the main one is connected to my switch & fibre router, another is connected to the ethernet. Rest are mesh only.
I have an old stone cottage with thick walls. In one instance I bounce the mesh signals out the window to the shed and back in again. (Obviously I cant know this is happening but its my working theory.)
The M5's are only AC1300 (not Wifi 6) but thats never been a problem even with 1/2 Gbs fibre to the house.
Thanks, that's a useful check on my natural inclination to upsell to one of their mid-range Wifi6 options.
We have an extensive (and messy) network of coax satellite cables to most rooms courtesy of the previous owners. If only they were ethernet.
Depends what you're doing - if it's just internet access, then yeah having a WiFi network capable of 25 times the throughput of your actual internet speed is going to be more than enough. However, if you are transferring lots of data within the network (i.e not going outside your gateway), if you have a NAS or a home media server for instance, then you will see benefits from going for the faster WAPs.
What's the actual layout of the environment? Mesh networks are expensive, and there are other things that might be possible. When we moved onto the farm, only one building had a phone line, so whilst we were wating on two more to be installed, I made a subnet on the cottage's network and used a WiFi bridge to connect it ~100m to the barn conversion, and then plugged the reciever into a WAP to get a whole new WiFi network in a different building. A LOT cheaper than a proper mesh WiFi network.
As always though, if the stuff you're connecting to doesn't move, and you're able to run ethernet cable to it, that is, and always will be the best option performance wise.
Thanks - I partly just wanted to check that is indeed how the numbers (75Mb connection; 1800+ wifi speed) interact and that I hadn't misunderstood - though I'm aware that it's a bit more complicated than that as the 1800+ is spread across bands etc.
House which is tall at the front, long and low at the back. Fibre enters, and router is currently in, bottom of the tall bit. Extremes at top and back of house therefore suffer weaker signal. I'll think again about hardwiring, or at least enough hardwiring to move the router, but part of the attraction of mesh was not having the hassle of routing cable around the place.
If you don't want to put in specific wiring, you could have a look at the PowerLine options - they use the power cables to transmit information between nodes so you connect one to your router and then plug in the other one(s) on different floors.
Thanks - see reply to Knee Yo for why I'm unsure about this. A difficult customer!
You can get PowerLine nodes that have wifi built in, so it should be a case of plugging one in and it extends your wifi, but you may well have issues if you have different electrical systems.
I hardwired our home offices, I think in the long term it's less hassle. I routed the cable along the outside of the house - I used CAT6 outdoor cable and some cable clips, then a long drill to go through the wall and a network socket on either end.
Indeed. It's what I'd do. The first time I did it, i used the hole the phone line comes in to route external shielded cat5e up the front of the house into the attic, into an old managed switch I'd pilfered from work, then through the ceiling into each room in the house.
It's a faff - might take a weekend's work to get it done, but for under £100 all-in it will last longer and handsomely out-perform a WiFi solution. It'll also cost less to run, and won't suffer from interference that's kicked out on the same frequency as WiFi by stuff like microwaves, flourescent lights, dimmer switches, bluetooth, etc (this can be fixed by multi-band WiFi, but the actual end-device has to support it - our internet radio cuts out when the microwave's on, and as it doesn't support 5Ghz, there's nothing I can do about it).
Installing some cables is the best bet. It also allows you to do fancy stuff like PoE (power over ethernet) which is great for things like external cameras - one cable for providing power and network connectivity, though PoE switches are more expensive than non-PoE ones.
All of those options you suggest are perfectly adequate if you're only considering bandwidth from your local devices to the internet - in that case the internet connection is the bottleneck. However if you're moving stuff around between devices, then the internal bandwidth matters of course, and then it would make sense to try and get a faster internal wifi speed.
I changed to WFH in 2020 and sometimes need to copy large files, images, databases, etc locally between computers (not so much a problem at my main desk as most things are plugged into a switch, but away from my desk it's wifi), and this improved massively once I took out a couple of ancient Apple Airport Extremes connected to each other between upstairs/downstairs via Powerline plugs and replaced with Netgear Orbi (1x router RBS50 plus 2x satellites RBR50 to cover upstairs, downstairs and garden log cabin). Tri-band so 5GHz and 2.4GHz for client devices and a dedicated 5GHz channel connecting the satelllites & router.
Thanks. We're not demanding users and the communication is all from internet to a limited number of devices and back again - it's literally just about getting more than one bar of wifi signal in my home office...
I guess one argument for buying something capable of faster speeds is future-proofing in case I increase the line speed at any point, but that way madness lies...
Of course the first thing I should probably do is buy a massive ethernet cable and see if simply relocating my ISP's router more centrally in the house improves things.
I'd definitely try relocating your router more centrally first before going the mesh route.
Not only is the upfront purchase cost of a mesh system going to be more than a length of Ethernet cable, but the ongoing electricity consumption for each mesh node is not insignificant.
Yes, instinctively I'd prefer not to have to power an extra 2 devices if I can avoid it, though finding an unobtrusive cable route may be tricky.