Anyone got Mesh Wifi at home?

[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.

[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".

[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.

[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.

[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]

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.

[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.

[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.