[SOLVED] Mesh Wifi - 6 Recommendations

[poconosms1]

Hi All,

Been kindof a lurker for a while. Always helpful.

My house is contemporary house of 2x6 construction . It's about 1900 sqft, but between the thickness of the walls a wifi unit - netgear nighthawk, was not strong enough. I switched to an orbi RBK50 a few years ago, and that recently stopped working - even a reset didn't work. The orbi worked real well with three units. I'm looking for suggestions to replace it.

my service is cable at 1gb
I work from home and need video conferencing - at peak my wife and daughter also work from home. my daughter needs video conferencing as well. My son's classes are all online video as well, so that makes a potential of 3 people video conferencing at the same time.
I'm looking to spend around 400-600

I'm looking at
Asus Zen WIFI AX6600
Orbi RBK852
linksys MX 10

I was concerned about the orbi because of some poor reviews, albeit mostly dealing with customer service.

I'm not a networking guy... so any help would be great.

 

[alceryes]

Instead of strictly wireless mesh you might want to consider a combo of powerline ethernet with WAPs. It sounds like your place isn't conducive to good wireless signal so instead of saturating the place with 3-5 mesh devices you could use your power outlets to provide high-speed network access between just two (or 3) WAPs. As long as you don't have multiple breaker boxes and there's nothing funky going on with your electrical grid, the powerline solution should give you the fastest access and lower latency, especially once you get to 3+ hops in a strictly wifi mesh network.

 

[kanewolf]

Even better than powerline, is MoCA if you have coax infrastructure available.

 

[poconosms1]

the house is coax wired, but it's so messed up that i would have to use ohm meter so I could figure it out, and unfortunately my work computer is wifi and the deactivated the usb and cat port. I need to get up asap, which i just got 2 feet of snow, so i can't even get our right now.

I did hard wire one of the furthest room.

I don't think using the electric is feasible. I get brown outs and surges a lot. my computer and orbi was on an ups , but it was old and i think it went bad. I had multiple electronic devices fry last week. I live at the top of the mountain. I was out of power once for five days.

I'll look at the powerline ethernet to be sure.

 

[poconosms1]

i really like that powerline option. can i use wall ups between the adapter and the plug?

 

[kanewolf]

i really like that powerline option. can i use wall ups between the adapter and the plug?

No. The adapter needs to be plugged directly to the wall. UPS or power strips kill the performance of powerline. They way they work is by putting high frequency RF on the power lines. The UPS and power strips have filters to get rid of this "noise". Except it isn't noise in this case.
If you get powerline, get the AV2 models. Typically marketed as "2000" speed.

 

[poconosms1]

dam, look liked a cheaper alternative, but too many surges in my area.

No. The adapter needs to be plugged directly to the wall. UPS or power strips kill the performance of powerline. They way they work is by putting high frequency RF on the power lines. The UPS and power strips have filters to get rid of this "noise". Except it isn't noise in this case.
If you get powerline, get the AV2 models. Typically marketed as "2000" speed.

 

[bill001g]

You do take some risk that power issues can damage the powerline units but it is not huge risk. The equipment you plug into the powerline is still isolated. The powerline units have a small internal power supply that runs the electronics. That is the what is at risk if you were to take a surge.

The actual powerline signal is using the power wires as a antenna. It actually uses a very similar encoding method to wifi but it the devices are connected via a "antenna wire" rather than getting the signal thought the air.

It is going to be worth the effort to sort out the coax cable. In general you could just try hooking to all together and see if it works. Having extra splitters and dead coax cables connected is not the best option but moca is fairly tolerant. The moca adapters by gocoax are about $60 each on amazon and you can get gigabit speeds. They say if you were to run more than 2 units the total network bandwidth is 2.5g.

 

[poconosms1]

maybe a combo of using the adapters for the computers, but i still need the wifi for the roku and the 10+ alexas and alexa shows in the house - don't I?

the guy who built this house put coax everywhere - even in the bathroom. I've been here for 20 years and the wires over time have all been disconnected. I'm not even sure of the condition, but maybe when its summer that'll be a good project.

I've been reading other chains here too. just so many complaints on other review sites about netgear products, so i'm afraid to go down that path....

 

[gggplaya]

Whichever system you buy, make sure it's capable of ethernet wired backhaul. That way, once you do get the coax cable sorted, you can MOCA wire backhaul all the mesh nodes so they're acting more like a traditional access point network which is used in commercial settings.

All cable coax splitters in the house need to be 5-2000mhz. Older splitters for analog tv are traditionally 5-1000mhz, but MOCA operates around 1150mhz to 1500mhz. So those old splitters would need to be replaced. You will also need to put a MOCA filter inline between where the cable company coax cable enters the house but before it enters the first splitter. If you aren't connected to a cable company don't worry about this.

 

[alceryes]

i really like that powerline option. can i use wall ups between the adapter and the plug?

They need to go directly into the outlets. You do run a risk of blowing them from surges but your other equipment (connected to the powerline adapters) should be fine.

The powerline would be used to 'extend' your wired network to different locations in the house. You would still plug a WAP into the powerline adapter on that 'far end'.
The benefit of this is that, as long as the powerline adapters are up and connected, you'll get wired speeds to the WAP.
It would be like you ran an ethernet cable through your house between the router and the WAP(s) on the far end. Much faster/more reliable/better than hopping through multiple repeaters/WAPs using a wireless mesh network.