Mesh wifi

[TimmyMallett]

Millions of products, help!

Currently have Google wifi that does 2.4 and 5 but the UI is pretty basic ands you cant 'instruct' devices to connect to one otr the other freq channel. Its old stuff, a couple are the original pucks and over the years I've bought newer ones but the time has come to sack it off as its quite old and my work connection is hit and miss. I've just bought a PS portal and that fails miserably unless its connected to the same node as the PS5, so, you know, man logic.

I think I'm looking at TP Link BE9300 3 pack but I'm not sure if I need wifi 7. Its being used with a VM Hub in modem mode.

500gb fttp, about 40 odd devices connected to the network wirelessly currently.

4 storey Victorian house 340sqm and I have 5 or 6 Google units that give flaky connection. When its stable it's fine, but it comes and goes.

I'm wondering if a 3 pack is enough? Any recommendations for thicker walls? One of the mesh points is hardwired (way over in the kitchen with cat6e so if I connect one there it will then have ethernet backhaul for that one unit. The rest of the house is impossible to get ethernet to. I'm happy to pay up to £500 IF it will get me a more stable connection and not end up with more black spots.

Edited by TimmyMallett on Wednesday 1st July 14:16

[camel_landy]

Annoyingly, without access to test equipment, it's a bit 'suck it and see' but don't forget that the units will radiate up and down too, so you might get better coverage with a couple of satellites positioned nearer the middle of the building (eg 2nd floor).

M

[TimmyMallett]

That's the plan. Router on ground, thrn directly up on 1st and second floors will be fine ad its just wood floors but its the outwards bit that might struggle.

I had read they wifi 6 and 7 are fast but not great as penetrative like 2.4 and 5?

[RizzoTheRat]

To really get the speed benefit from wifi 7 you need the 6 GHz channel, which doesn't penetrate as well as 5GHz. I'm on 600Mbps cable and Wifi6 is easily up to the job of that if I'm in line of sight to an access point, but on 5GHz it drops off a bit with a wall in between, so 6GHz would probably be worse.

Can you run cables anywhere? A wired backhaul will always beat a wireless backhaul. My house had old phone lines to several rooms that we didn't need, and as they were in ducts I was able to use the old cables to pull pairs of Cat5e ethernet cables through, and now have an AP on each floor all with wired backhaul, and some of the heavy users like my main PC and the TV connected via ethernet as well.

If you have to go wireless then tri band may work out better than dual band as it has the extra channel for the AP's to talk to each other.

As a start point I'd turn off all your current AP's except the ones that are connected by ethernet, and use a phone app like wifiman to look at how strong the signal is around the house. If you're going to use mesh you need to sit the nodes in a location where they have a really strong connection to a wired node, and can then transmit in to the areas without any signal.