Reply to: Anyone got Mesh Wifi at home?

[unixman]

I re-purposed a couple of old BT hubs as extra wifi access points. I've done it with a hub 1, hub 3, and hub 5, the last one also having 5 Ghz capability. Works fine.

[d000hg]

GL with not having to restart these £20-30 APs on a daily basis and getting any half decent throughput 5" away from them. Even more so being constantly nagged by the wife/kids that the WiFi is broken...

I have some homeplugs which have WAP functionality, and a £15 Netgear repeater. They all work pretty well and don't need restarting. I can access even the cheap one from several rooms away. My wife is tech-savvy and we don't have kids though I'm sure they would understand it better than I did anyway

Most vendors sell "kits" of 3 APs at least one of them being a router for around £300 - this can cover 3 story house + garden/garage in most cases. You call that pricey?

Yes because it is. You get a free router from your ISP or buy one for £50 and can get 3 more APs for little more. Even a Homeplug setup is considerably cheaper.

The tech behind mesh is not that expensive, but the kit currently on the market comes with high ends specs in terms of number of antennas, throughput intelligent band steering etc. "Build your own" router + WiFi extenders with the same specs will cost roughly the same

Will it balls. I just bought a VR900 which is not far off the top of TP-Link's range and far better than your bog-standard home-hub. It will have much better features than an individual mesh unit and cost £100, which is slightly less than most mesh units. I could buy 3 - which is utter overkill - for £300 and have far better coverage BUT no seamless meshy functionality.

It's not purely marketing, although you can say it's a buzz word for a functionality that already existed in the enterprise market for quite some time.

The important bit is that the individual APs "talk" to each other, thus able to seamlessly pass on sessions between them.

I wonder if they'll start bringing this out as a more standard feature on regular routers and APs, and standardising (maybe via firmware updates)? It would be very cool.

[Manic]

Depends on the house surely? I'd be very sceptical that it would cover 3 floors and a garden office like my mesh setup does. Even if it does work, I suspect that the speed at the edges would be rubbish....

Yes of course. I have more than one device but when running on a single LR AP which is located in the middle of the house I get plenty of signal even down the driveway. The house sited ones are all Ethernet wired but I do have one in the garage room (detached away from house) running over a homeplug as I don't have Ethernet there and the house based wifi was on the edge of reliability.

[b0redom]

Depends on the house surely? I'd be very sceptical that it would cover 3 floors and a garden office like my mesh setup does. Even if it does work, I suspect that the speed at the edges would be rubbish....

[Manic]

GL with not having to restart these £20-30 APs on a daily basis and getting any half decent throughput 5" away from them. Even more so being constantly nagged by the wife/kids that the WiFi is broken...

Most vendors sell "kits" of 3 APs at least one of them being a router for around £300 - this can cover 3 story house + garden/garage in most cases. You call that pricey?

The tech behind mesh is not that expensive, but the kit currently on the market comes with high ends specs in terms of number of antennas, throughput intelligent band steering etc. "Build your own" router + WiFi extenders with the same specs will cost roughly the same



It's not purely marketing, although you can say it's a buzz word for a functionality that already existed in the enterprise market for quite some time.

The important bit is that the individual APs "talk" to each other, thus able to seamlessly pass on sessions between them.

WRT £300 kits, take a look at Ubiquiti. Their long Range device should be enough for a house on it's own.

[sal]

It seems to me the ONLY thing you gain is seamless WiFi. And it IS that pricey. £100 minimum per hotspot for N hotspots plus a router/modem when a simple AP is £20-30 and you still get to use your router so you need N-1 extenders.
I'm not sure if the mesh tech is that much more complex or it's just pricey 'cos it's new.

GL with not having to restart these £20-30 APs on a daily basis and getting any half decent throughput 5" away from them. Even more so being constantly nagged by the wife/kids that the WiFi is broken...

Most vendors sell "kits" of 3 APs at least one of them being a router for around £300 - this can cover 3 story house + garden/garage in most cases. You call that pricey?

The tech behind mesh is not that expensive, but the kit currently on the market comes with high ends specs in terms of number of antennas, throughput intelligent band steering etc. "Build your own" router + WiFi extenders with the same specs will cost roughly the same

from what I can tell 'mesh' is purely a marketing term for multiple access points, with the same SSID and linked together.

In the old days you'd get multiple Cisco APs setup identically (except IP/hostname), all wired to the same VLAN and spread them round the building.
Later Cisco APs, with 2 radios, could be used with one radio linked to the nearest other AP as a bridge, and the 2nd radio doing SSID. This 'mesh' appears to be the same as that.
The device switching from one AP to another is not (or certainly wasn't) a function of the AP, rather it was the wireless NIC driver that determined.
So for those trying to build this manually without expensive 'mesh enabled' devices try putting the APs closer so that the overlap is greater that way it should switch to the other AP while the weaker AP is still strong enough. Expect maybe 150-200ms dropout and TCP connections will carry on without dropping.

It's not purely marketing, although you can say it's a buzz word for a functionality that already existed in the enterprise market for quite some time.

The important bit is that the individual APs "talk" to each other, thus able to seamlessly pass on sessions between them.

[TheFaQQer]

Perhaps the question shouldn't be "has anyone got one?", rather "does anyone regret buying one?"

I don't know anyone who has said "it wasn't worth it".

[d000hg]

So each disc/hotspot gives a comparable performance/range to a regular router like what your ISP gives for free, approximately? Not bad.

I needed to make a fast decision as my HomeHub was crapping out and got a TPLink VR900 IIRC... I'll wait on Mesh becoming less early-adopter by which time I might have a need for wifi in the garage and garden rooms.

[b0redom]

Yeah I love the idea but can't see if I can justify the cost just for saving me 5s if I want to play chess on the bog which is covered by the extender

I've seen at least one setup lets you chain devices with ethernet to cover bigger distances e.g. house<-->garden, I wonder if powerline/homeplug (are these the same?) can do this too.

You said you're got 3 discs and presumably turned WiFi off on your original router, is that one per floor or what? How big is your house and how far away is the garden office? I'm a bit dubious the range of a single disc compared to a regular router... a decent router will cover most but not all my house.

Yeah I turned off wifi off on my router - the discs are significantly faster in any case.

I have one disc at the front of the house attached to the router where the DSL enters the house, one in the loft conversion at the back of the house (ie 2nd floor) and one in the office at the bottom of the garden all cabled back via cat5.

I did need to turn off one of the discs (the one in the office) when I was doing some rewiring, and my laptop still had a decent signal back to the house, although my phone didn't.

As with a lot of things my time is way more expensive than just chucking stuff at the problem.

The discs will use wifi to mesh if you don't have cat5, but I've not bothered experimenting with that as I have wires anyway.

They app does add some extra stuff, like the ability to force devices off the network, set up a guest wifi access point in software, show which devices are connected to which disc, and advise on disc placement.

TBH I think given the cost they're great.

[d000hg]

Sorry I mis-read that it was wireless both ends. Although I'd still have hoped it could work with a little coaxing.

[TheFaQQer]

If you have wireless devices like a printer you'll need to make sure you're on the same network before accessing it though, which can be an issue (particularly for children).

I was never sure about this, if the printer is plugged into the central router and you're on MyNetwork_kitchen which is a repeater for the router, shouldn't it still work? I have the same curiosity with Google home/chromecast. Not tested yet to find out.

If the printer is plugged into the router then it's not wireless though

I have a printer that connects to one SSID in the house. If I connect to the other one (guest wifi rather than main) then I cannot find the printer because it's on a different network.

[d000hg]

They definitely do if you're using Cisco Aeronet APs.
I can't comment on other technologies as I only use Cisco.

And how much does that cost? And what devices did you test it on? They may have been doing it for years, I don't think anyone claimed Mesh is new but that doesn't mean it doesn't work differently to regular setups. Maybe they had their own proprietary way of broadcasting before anyone got round to agreeing standards (not that they are widely followed which is a good sign Mesh wifi probably isn't ready for general consumer use)


This article mentions Asus adding mesh functionality to their products via firmware which is an interesting idea if others do it.
http://www.alphr.com/technology/1006...-uk-wi-fi-woes

[northernladuk]

I was never sure about this, if the printer is plugged into the central router and you're on MyNetwork_kitchen which is a repeater for the router, shouldn't it still work? I have the same curiosity with Google home/chromecast. Not tested yet to find out.

I have a problem relating to this at home. With a weak wifi signal in the office from the main router I put another in the living room next door. The printer was forever dropping in and out and it appears, after some playing, it must see two different options to pick from with the same SSID and instead of picking one like every other device in the house it just bums out. It works with one or the other on, it works when there is two different SSID's, just not when they are the same. That's why I went for the direct wifi connection.

Everything else works hunky dorey and always connects to the strongest signal just this one bloody printer. It's an HP 6970. The HP 6600 I had before wasn't perfect either but never took the time to diagnose it to this level.

I don't know anyone else having the same problem and couldn't be arsed logging it to see if they knew as it works fine as it is.

Maybe something to consider if you start having problems.

[Lance]

Devices definitely won't flit from one AP to another seamlessly..

They definitely do if you're using Cisco Aeronet APs.
I can't comment on other technologies as I only use Cisco.

[The Spartan]

If you have wireless devices like a printer you'll need to make sure you're on the same network before accessing it though, which can be an issue (particularly for children).

I bought a dual band WiFi extender and have found this isn't an issue, I can print on the wireless printer regardless of which AP I'm on.

I didn't do anything to configure it to do this either, it was setup to work like this out of the box.