I need a new solution to my networking issues. I have a 2 story house with a finished basement. Currently I have Att gigabit fiber connected to a Netgear Nighthawk R7500v2 and Netgear WAC124 Wireless access point. The router is on the main floor with the access point on the 2nd floor. I think the router is just showing it’s age with random dropouts and we have always had certain locations with spotty wifi.
I have ethernet run to 3 locations in my house, one on each floor. I have been looking for a networking solution that would be low maintenance and solve our wifi coverage issues and dropouts. Mesh systems seem like they would be the easy answer, but I know that easy isn’t always best. I only want to spend around $300-400, so I think most Ubiquiti or enterprise level stuff is out.
Would a $100 Asus router on each floor be the best solution, or is there a better option? Thanks!
very simple reason to avoid: mesh halves bandwidth.
You can see wifi as semi-half-duplex. You only have limited amount of concurrent talkers and that’s only with MU-MIMO (multi-user-MIMO). Most current devices support MU-MIMO on the Downlink side, but less talked part is that not neccessarily all of them support MU-MIMO on the Uplink side. And with mesh, there’s always someone upstreaming (either far side transmits or near side sends). Also, devices nowadays aren’t really idle, most of the devices are constantly sending/receiving, even if at low bitrate. With many devices that just creates unneccesary radio congestion. Multi-Point mesh is even worse, then you have multiple devices sharing the same radio channel and MIMO resources.
the only really usable meshing way is to have a dedicated radio backhaul just for interconnecting your access points and then have separate radios to serve clients. But, most home devices have just two radios. So either you backhaul with 2,4Ghz (much less total bandwidth, and many smart home devices like smartlamps, AC controllers etc still run 2,4G only) or you use faster 5Ghz as backhaul, but then stuck with slow 2,4GHz clients. Three radio devices are rare and expensive.
Mesh is cool for latency non-sensitive devices like smarthome stuff, low quality (or motion sensor based) surveillance cameras, regular web clients etc. As soon as you start to go into latency sensitive (online gaming, real-time communication), you’ll see bad (or occasionally bad and worst of all, uncontrollable) experience.
Do yourself a favour and use wired backhaul. If you don’t have enough cables, you can use something like Ubiquiti U6 In-wall AP (a very capable Wifi6 grade device and not that expensive), where you have an AP on the wall, but it has additional 4 port switch to connect your wired devices like consoles/PC-s/TV-s.
so you have your router (you can use your current one) and then run one U6 In-wall to each floor. That will take care of covering wireless services on that floor and you get to have 4 wired ports on each floor, so you can connect wired devices also.