Question Mesh Wireless for 2700sq ft House?

[whitedragon551]

I currently rock a Meraki MX64 firewall at home with a Linksys EA8500ac for a 1600sq ft condo. My current setup is insufficient for a few reasons. 1) my meraki license is up for renewal, 2) the EA8500 is not sufficient for a 2700sqft house to have coverage, 3) Linksys released firmware about a year ago that broke the 5Ghz band and caused continuous dropping. They have yet to fix it.

I've been looking at mesh wireless systems like the eero, nest mesh system, ubiquity, etc. I'm leaning toward the Synology setup with an RT2600AC and the MR2200ac to cover the house, garage, and most of the yard( 2700sqft and just over 1/4 of an acre). I have prior experience with Synology storage solutions and the support and hardware was top notch. The house is 3 floors (basement, main, and an upstairs with deck/patio off the back and a garage off the front). I want a system that has a dedicated 5Ghz band for mesh only. Getting rid of the Meraki will require I replace the web filtering for my kids with something else.

Systems Im currently considering are:

1. Synology RT2600AC/MR2200AC
2. Netgear Nighthawk XRM570
3. Eero with 2 Eero Pros

1. What technology do these systems use to implement their web filtering? Currently i use the Meraki MX64 to filter out specific categories for specific devices. I have 2 kids that have their web traffic severely limited. I also use the firewall to block things like Roblox. I havent been able to find much online. It sounds like the Synology uses Google DNS, but thats all I can gather.
2. Does the synology solution offer full feature replacement for the MX64? Currently my plan is to get rid of the MX64. Current setup is ISP > cable modem > firewall > wireless router in bridge mode. Firewall handles DHCP and IP reservations.
3. Is my proposed solution overkill for the space i need to cover?

 

[bill001g]

What do you think MESH really is. This is just a slightly better form of wifi repeater. It still have a extra wifi signal between the router and the repeater. Placement is critical and in some houses there is no good place. When you get good signal on one side of wall and bad on the other you can't really solve that. You can't place the repeater on the far side and of you place it on the near side there is no guarantee it will work though the wall. Even if the repeater can blast the signal through the wall the end device may not have the power to talk back. Any form of repeater will degrade your performance and you now have a second radio signal subject to interference from neighbors.

You want to use repeaters as a very last option. Consider a ethernet cable with a AP or use powerline or moca and then place a AP on the end of that.

I am somewhat surprised that the meraki works for you. This whole industry is pretty much dead. They claim stuff like "deep packet inspection" but that is impossible since everything is encrypted with HTTPS. This leave IP address restriction. Maybe you can get lists of IP but since everything is hosted say in google or microsoft or akamai they mean very little. Lots of servers even share IP. The very last point to spy on traffic is the DNS but microsoft already has encrypted dns in test builds and it will be incorporated in to the main windows image "soon"

 

[whitedragon551]

Mesh is clearly a wireless repeater, but having its own wireless backbone instead of sharing with other connected devices is a better alternative.

Unfortunately the house is not wired for ethernet. It may be an old enough house that a powerline adapter works. Typically they dont work real well if outlets are not on the same circuit.

 

[mihen]

Only the netgear is triband. None of the solutions support the Ax/Wifi 6 standard. So it's tough to say if you will be getting a sufficient upgrade to even be worth considering.
Something with Wifi 6 will cover the same space with 2 nodes instead of 3.

 

[whitedragon551]

Only the netgear is triband. None of the solutions support the Ax/Wifi 6 standard. So it's tough to say if you will be getting a sufficient upgrade to even be worth considering.
Something with Wifi 6 will cover the same space with 2 nodes instead of 3.

Triband and using a dedicated broadcast hardware on a dual band are not the same thing. The Synology is dual band, but has a 2nd 5Ghz band that is only used for the backhaul.

 

[mihen]

What I mean is, do you really want to spend $350 on something that is 3 years old and running on the same standard as your existing Wifi network?

 

[whitedragon551]

What I mean is, do you really want to spend $350 on something that is 3 years old and running on the same standard as your existing Wifi network?

I have 0 issues with speed on any of my devices with the Linksys, but yes. As I mentioned Linksys released a patch that broke 5Ghz band on my current device and thus I cannot upgrade to the latest firmware. They refused to fix it. Instead they are making us upgrade anyway. Secondly, my device will not cover a 2700sqft house properly so it needs replaced with a system that can anyway.