WiFi extender for full fibre in a big old house

[Danns]

Can’t really compare eero to 4 BT disks hardwired.

I actually went from BT 3 disks
To
Linksys Velop 6 nodes - (terrible- avoid, at all costs! Actually the worst product I’ve used, ever!)

To 3 Eeros - and then added another 25 meters away from the house to get coverage to cameras / smart lights / wifi in garden.

Also challenging house - zero stud walls, all brick + celotex / render mesh / things which like to block wifi!

I can’t actually recall a time I’ve had an eero node drop out/ need restarting etc, BT system non hardwired needed frequent restarts.

[b14]

If you can wire the house and you are on a budget, then wire it and put in APs. Trust me, whilst the mesh stuff works for some, statistically it's not great for houses like yours and more likely than not, the money you spend on it would be wasted.

Go straight for wired APs. The only difficult bit is getting the wirea in but you can do that yourself, and if you choose power over ethernet then you don't even need to put the APs near plugs. Mesh works fine in some situations but wired APs are guaranteed to work, and work well.

Just wanted to pass on since in my last house, which was a standard construction 50s build, not massive, 3 decos couldn't deliver. And one deco with direct line of sight to another deco in our summer house, around 40 feet, sucked. We're in the middle of a house build for a big place and it's getting wired APs throughout.

[The Three D Mucketeer]

B5mike said:

Don't bother with Eero if you have a challenging house. My 5 year old BT Whole Home WiFi 5 mesh does a significantly better job of coverage in my thick walled stone house than the WiFi 6 Eero mesh that was supposed to replace it (even on WiFi 6 devices). I have reverted to the BT set-up which still works extremely well - 4 disks with Ethernet backhaul. I expect established brands like TP Link are a better bet than Eero.

You'll find EERO have been around a reasonable length of time , AMAZON acquired them in 2019 for $97m .

Edited by The Three D Mucketeer on Monday 6th May 08:54

[B5mike]

I think they (Eero) are more of a "brand". Look good, but not actually that high performance...

Edited by B5mike on Monday 6th May 10:37

[The Three D Mucketeer]

Who makes the BT Disks , BT sells/rents ?
Huawei ?

Edited by The Three D Mucketeer on Monday 6th May 09:24

[Timfy]

I use ASUS stuff just because it's easy to mix and match with what I already had -- and setup/management is so easy even I can do it.

We an RT-AX82U before and whilst it was a lot better than my old ISP router it did struggle a bit at the extremes of the house. When we had gigabit fibre put in it came with an Eero thing which was pretty useless for our building so it got put back in the box pretty quickly.

I added 2 XD6S as mesh nodes and went back to the RT-AX82U as a main router and even just on a wireless backhaul it's been pretty much faultless, all set up within minutes and great speeds across the entire house. (the office is at the furthest point from where they put the fibre in (the other side of the house to the old BT master socket) so I'm now mostly working where we wouldn't get coverage at al with the ISP router. )

I intend to add some ethernet at some point although it's only really a nice to have as it's performing plenty well enough for us without at the moment.

Edited by Timfy on Monday 6th May 09:25

[DonkeyApple]

OP, I'll give another nod for the Deco stuff. We had a similar issue to you re old walls. Mine was 5ksq ft where half was original Victorian solid walls up through 3 floors and then the rear was a wrap around 2 floor section. The broadband arrived in the corner of the new open plan section. And there was very little space where any signal could pass through between the two parts. We had the additional issue that the new section was on a different ring to the old.

I took a punt and bought 3 power line decos and three of the disc ones. The three towers were used for taking the incoming signal and spreading it all over the L shaped half of the property and then the discs were used on each floor of the old part to pick that signal up.

It all worked seamlessly and was genuinely idiot proof tech. You loose a chunk of speed but we had over 100 coming in and at the furthest reaches it was still usually around 100 which considering we had previously been able to stream TV using a broken up copper overhead and about 5mb wasn't an issue for us.

I still use them now in another property that is originally solid stone and with a cavity extension on the side and two different rings. Same sort of issues but half the area.

In addition, I've found it easier to just have our own system and becoming wholly agnostic to the origin of that signal. When we moved I didn't have to do anything other than plug the master in and all devices just connected to the original network. When the broadband fails the 4G router gets plugged in to the Deco network and everything carries on uninterrupted.

I had previously used a Belkin extender plug in a flat in London where they worked fine but not in a more complex environment. I'd also tried the BT mesh solution but it wasn't really working and it also meant I was paying money to have to be on hold to BT which is insane to persist with so it was returned. I took a punt on Deco, quite possibly due to a tip on PH, and the stuff has just been idiot proof from start to finish and fits my explicit demand for tech to equal less work than before and superior result.

[biggiles]

+1 for Deco. Trouble-free for years, I recommend them often and they are easy to set up. I have quite a few of them...

[swisstoni]

I’ve got (5) Google Nest Wifi points dotted about a pretty large house with solid walls.
Works well in my experience with very friendly, well designed admin app. Something other makers of wizzy gear often overlook in my experince.

You can also “Hey Google …” them if you feel lonely