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Afternoon All
I've been struggling for a little while with the mesh setup at home and it's causing problems WFH and being on video calls for large periods of the day.
Setup is a Virgin home hub 3 modem with 200MB fibre connection and a Netgear Orbi RBK13 (router + 2 satellites). The modem and router are at the front of the house and my office is at the back of the garage at the rear of the house, with the router and two satellites arranged in a line of ~14m with 1 satellite in the middle. There are 6 masonry walls (2 of which make up a chimney breast) to contend with..
The issue is the internet dropping for maybe 10s or so intermittently. Sometimes it won't happen all day, sometimes it will drop maybe 10 times in a working day and everything in between. It's normally back relatively quickly but at other times my work laptop sees the connection as "no internet" while other devices are still connected to internet (which requires a reboot of the laptop and can mean 5-10 mins out of a work call worst case).
Am I just at the limit of what is realistic with a relatively cheap (£140 I think) mesh system? Or is there something I can do to manually configure things to address this issue? I've done a factory reset on both the Virgin and Netgear kit, made sure firmware was all up to date and recommissioned the network from scratch with a new name. I haven't gone any further than this at the moment.
I've just measured the connection in my office as 31Mb down/15Mb up. Next the router at the front of the house and it is 217Mb down/21Mb up. That feels like quite a bit of loss but I'm not sure if that is expected given the setup/physical environment. But the issue is not speed it is reliability.. not sure if the two are connected?
Can anyone help please? It's a good job my office is almost completely isolated in terms of sound from the rest of the house as I'm screaming blue murder everytime it happens!
Cheers
Nick
14 metres from the main road to your office? Run a cable
Thanks, aye it is quite a long run.. it’s basically front corner of the house to opposing rear corner of garage diagonally. Running a cable not impossible but a bit of a pain with a mix of suspended wooden floor in house then concrete in garage. I bought the mesh to try and avoid this but starting to think I should have bought a higher end system that I could scale with additional satellites.
Unless your house is terraced, is the easiest solution not to pop some holes in your walls and run a cable externally from the router to the garage?
Powerline any good?
Thanks for the responses. I haven’t any experience of powerline, is that more appropriate/effective in this application? I could potentially run a cable outside, up the wall and then behind gutters over the garage roof and into the office at the back.
We use powerline to run data from one end of the house to the other. It’s good enough for the girls to be streaming and using their iPads on, though I’ve no doubt properly run Cat6 would be better.
I’d echo that, we’ve got lots of external cable to the lounge, kitchen, office and playroom, and use Powerline in the kids bedrooms. Powerline is very convenient, but I don’t think it’s stable enough for lots of VOIP or Teams/Zoom etc.
My office is now above the garage, about 15m from the house - laying a cable there isn’t an option. I’m using two Ubiquiti Outdoor Mesh AP with a clear line of sight between the house and garage, with a switch at the end on the garage so everything back to cable. So far they’ve been utterly stable, and I’m getting the same broadband speeds on download as wired to the router in the house, very low latency, and about 850mbps to the NAS. An external cable run would be quicker, more stable and a lot cheaper though...
It’s starting to look like I need to buy some cable and get the SDS out 😂
Thanks all.
I tried Powerline adaptors for my home office as the wi-fi signal wasn't good enough when I started working from home.
I got some £50 Netgear ones from Argos with mains feedthrough so I didn't lose a socket.
They have been rock-solid now for almost a year. We do a lot of Teams calls and it works perfectly well for that.
I'd be tempted to try them (perhaps from Amazon as they are generally really good with returns) and try them out.
If they don't work, send them back.
Câble will be a LOT cheaper and more stable than a mesh system for sure