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Russell Nah, just a single MR32 AP for now. Was handy to run a specific work SSiD and it covers most of the house, but it needs to go into a building that will finally open in Jan, so I’m on the hunt for something. We experimented with mesh for some tricky retrofits in existing buildings but as you said the lack of backhaul trashes performance.
I've had the google/nest mesh system for a week now. Very easy to set up, seems to work well. I believe it automatically swaps channels to keep best performance.
One of the challenges of these home mesh systems is that most of them cannot have the channel changed.
Have a look at the Synology Networking equipment. Lots of wifi adjustments, latest WPA3 (if your computer kit supports it) and a doddle to set up (the only black mark against UniFi stuff for home use). More importantly it's firmware gets regular updates. (The UniFi and TP-Link Omada stuff gets a monthly refresh as business kit).
@claudie The Synology stuff requires you to set up the router then configure the node unit while it's alongside. Then you shut it down and move it to the final position and set it running. Once linked the firmware will update at the same time as the base unit through the browser interface.
I have the same 200 mbps VM service that you do. It all worked as expected apart from a wifi dropout in my son's room. I ended up running an ethernet cable from my switch to his room, into an old router (not routing) so he has 3 or 4 ethernet ports and his own WAP. WAP as in Wireless Access Point, but I now believe it is an acronym for Wireless Application Protocol.
I Googled 'WAP' just to check...
Do not Google 'WAP'!
How reliable have people's mesh systems been once set-up? My dad's been struggling with powerline adapters for years but he just about gets by (he's not a gamer :p ) however he's happy to spend money on a mesh system for something that's a bit faster and more reliable. However every time I look at Amazon reviews there's always loads along the lines of "worked great initially but started getting drop-outs after a few months, wish I'd not bothered" type reviews which really puts me off as I'd be his remote IT support (and neither of us particularly patient :p ).
Our 3 Orbi setup has been flawless. It's not the most intuitive to set up, and getting the Satellites to connect initially can be a bit hit and miss.
Once running tho, absolutely zero issues at all. It doesn't have the coverage of the marketing blurb, but we have a funny shaped house with some very thick walls. The included gigabit ports on each unit are useful for connecting NAS, SIP phone. Raspberry, etc.
Other than letting it update itself, I've not touched it in a year. It was expensive and the units are pretty large, but it fixed all the issues we'd had with the Tenda system.
Orbi mesh here. Fit and forget.
Good coverage/speed and not touched it in about 18 months which is what I wanted.
I've gone full Google in my house and recently bought/installed the Nest Wifi with additional access point. I was using Virgin router+powerline adapter which just about worked, but my lad constantly complained whilst gaming in his bedroom up a floor and otherside of 3 bed 70s house.
Extremely easy to setup, and the access point is a speaker as well. I can schedule each of the kids devices and restrict websites (although I think that is on or off, not very configurable). My access point is out in the conservatory, which I doubt is actually that necessary as wifi signal without was pretty good. It seems to switch 2.4 -5 automatically as I havent had to configure anything on older devices.
My only issue with it is there is only 1 additional ethernet port on the router, which I have had to use for my Hue hub. I would have liked my PC to use ethernet, but TBF the WiFi has been extremely solid and my cable is old Cat5 100Mb anyway.
Virgin 350mb service (clocks in at 384mb) with a Netgear Orbi router (RBR50) and two satellites here (RBS50). Dedicated 5ghz back-haul for the router to satellite link. Virgin router is in modem mode, Orbi router taking on all routing duties in combination with Pi-Hole on a RasperryPi4 for DNS duties. Works well, no disconnections or restarts, full 384mb available throughout the house. The Orbi's have 4 ethernet ports on the satellites too, very useful for getting an ageing MacPro with a low spec WiFi card to have full internet rate / network throughput available.
The new AC spec Orbi's are a bit steep on price though...
However every time I look at Amazon reviews there’s always loads along the lines of “worked great initially but started getting drop-outs after a few months,
Honestly, I take those with a pinch of salt unless there's loads of them, everything on Amazon has its share. "Worked great for two days then died, one star." Well then, it's broken, shit happens, send it back for a replacement, you're an idiot.
not my experience with Unifi... unbox, plug in, everything worked 😎and a doddle to set up (the only black mark against UniFi stuff for home use)
TP Link Deco M5 (no backhaul) here for a few years. Been faultless. Noticed the other day they've added a network optimisation feature that looks for clashing channels and adjusts the config as necessary. Assume others do this too.
fwiw, for a 1930s 3 bed house with internal brick walls:
NowTV hub - rubbish
Tenda powerline adapters - rubbish
TP-link AC1750 router - great
Re: channels - I thought that mesh systems were supposed to be smart and choose the best channel/ interface for doing stuff, and adapt as things change? Or have I over-interpreted what I have read about them?
Anyhow, if it is recommendation time, my set of TP-link Deco M9+ have worked great for about four months. Router functionality is limited, so if you like to tinker with that, keep your old router to do the routing. And for the ethernets I have got a couple of 5-port switches to provide the wired connections (like most such devices, each only has two ethernet sockets). It seems odd to buy things with functionality you don't use (each of them could act as a router), but I guess that the only difference would be in the software. Set up was easy, though you can only do it though the app and bluetooth, the network interface is limited.
I assume that in time the main manufacturers will build mesh into their routers so you could buy a more full-featured tinkerable router plus however many satellites you needed.
I assumed it was channels. What it actually said was network congested, then did something and said it was optimised.
@zilog6128 it depends on how much you wish to tinker and the connection to the outside that you use. From the box setting up is not that intuitive when using a POE controller attached to a switch. If you don't wish to use their cloud based interface it's a little challenging. I set our work network up and getting cloud controller talking to USG took me a couple of goes but I'm a have a go type not a trained networking engineer. (It helps that the distributor is in the same town and support from them is great). Tacking on wireless after the initial set-up was easy and the tweaks for all areas of the network are great.
My preferred fancypants solution these days is TP-Link Omada EAP-225/EAP-245/Controller. It’s a TP-Link version of Unifi at TP-Link prices and with fewer hinky POE hurdles. Not one you can just take out of a box and expect a setup wizard to sort for you though.
That's what was recommended to me recently through another channel.
We've got a steel frame and a basement so have 3x Cisco WAP121 access points and a TP Link router. Small, PoE and were way cheaper than the UniFi at the time. Absolute performance and range dont matter too much if you've got wired connections to router and lots of APs...
So, I'm up and running. It's been a bumpy journey, but that's not entirely Tenda's fault.
Kit arrived mid-morning, I started the install at 1pm as someone else is WFH here today. Had mares getting it to connect to the VM router in "modem mode," the router either doesn't DHCP or does so really, really badly. After 45 minutes of swearing I had it limping along with the 'hub' back in router mode and three mesh boxes connected up but with me connected to the farthest away. I had to abort mission at that point as I was very late for a conference call.
Teams call was incredibly choppy, which I put down to being connected to the wrong unit. Hacking about with it during the call it seems there's a "fast roaming" setting which allows it to hand over between nodes more aggressively. This seemed relevant. Then the entire system went down.
An hour of wailing and gnashing of teeth later, it transpired that completely coincidentally Virgin Media had a service outage in the area. A phone call got me an automated response saying it'd be back up by the rather specific 7:05pm this evening.
Whilst I was a tad sceptical to say the least, at somewhere around 6:45pm the router status light clicked back to white and I got back to work.
Turns out, I cannot get any sense out of the router in modem mode, it just doesn't work (though the LED turns a very pretty colour). Maybe I need to put the primary node into Bridge mode rather than DHCP or some such, but I couldn't get the app to connect to it at all like this. I can't directly disable Wi-Fi on the router - this is supposedly what Modem Mode does - but going into Advanced / Wireless / Signal I can independently shut down the 2.4GHz and 5GHz signals which amounts to the same thing.
Now, suddenly, it seems to be doing what I expected it to do seven hours ago. Testing is ongoing for edge cases but I've doubled the connection speed in the office (whereas on initial connection it halved).
Take-aways:
1) In response to @eatsdirt's query, no, I cannot manually select channels. But this doesn't seem to matter. It rather appears to flood across all of them so manually configuring them would be akin to managing a LAN full of static IP addresses, I think the simple answer here is that it's cleverer than I am.
2) Virgin's "Super Hub 3" is toilet. The UI is slow as arse, you can't do shit with it and it takes upwards of five minutes to boot, which it needs to do often.
3) Modem Mode isn't just toilet, if it sucked any deeper I'd be seeing kangaroos. (Or this could just have been user error, I Am Not A Network Engineer.)
4) Undertaking a LAN upgrade half an hour before your ISP manages to hack through a nearby WAN cable does not do wonders for your geek credibility in the home.
5) The Tenda MW12s are seemingly great so far IF they've got a reliable Internet connection. If not, forget it.
6) Most official Tenda documentation / support is seemingly in Chinese-as-a-first-language English, including the management app. If you're expecting to rely heavily on manufacturer support I'd perhaps suggest a different product.
7) Victory through superior firepower. Gamer Boi next door can suck my Wi-Fi till it Hertz.
Cheers cougar, I tried the docs route for tenda and couldn’t get what I was looking for. I am not a returner by nature, but I’m tempted to just get one and jib it back if it doesn’t work out. My sky Q is a temperamental beast and I’ve found hammer level channel control and a wifi analyser has been the only way to get it all to behave. Frankly I wanted to get the big drill out and wire it all, but the minister of the interior threatened sanctions.if you think the VM router is guff, never go to EE. Shockingly bad
Seems like a Virgin issue rather than a Tenda issue?
FWIW my Tenda setup process was pretty painless. Plug into Sky router, download phone app, set WiFi name and password, plug other boxes in one at a time, scan QR code on box to add them to network and check signal. Done.
6 boxes in about 20 mins. Been reliable ever since and those were the el-cheapo MW3 boxes.
Virgin media hub 3 in modem only mode here.
In this mode, only the bottom network port (or the first one you plug in after putting it into modem only mode according to some reports) works.
So you need
Media hub in modem only mode connected to first Tenda unit directly and then if you have anything else that was connected to the media hub, you need to plug that into the lan socket on the tenda unit. If you have multiple things that were plugged into the media hub, you’ll need a switch, connected to the lan port of the Tenda unit.
It took a bit of trial and error and googling to get my MW6 units playing nicely. But I did get there.
As mentioned above, but worth repeating - only one ethernet port works in modem only mode on the virgin router, port 1. Router then sits at 192.168.100.1 not 192.168.0.1
Installed BT WholeHome a couple of weeks - works brilliantly. 3 disks in the house and one in the garden office 40 meters away. The disk in the office has line of sight to one in the window of a bedroom in the house. Signal in the office is sufficient for Teams/Zoom calls etc. Far, far better and more reliable than the power line adapters being used before.
In this mode, only the bottom network port (or the first one you plug in after putting it into modem only mode according to some reports) works.
As mentioned above, but worth repeating – only one ethernet port works in modem only mode on the virgin router, port 1. Router then sits at 192.168.100.1 not 192.168.0.1
Can we sanity-check this please? Port 1 on the SH(it)3 is the top port, the bottom one is #4.
On my SH3, port 1 is at the top of the yellow block of 4. Mine is currently in modem only mode, with the Orbi router the only device connected. IP address is 192.168.100.1 - self assigned when switching from router to modem mode.
It might be rubbish as a router on its own, but in modem only mode, it doesn't matter. I don't go near it unless the external network is down.
fwiw I spent today setting up bt whole home wifi (the medium range one, not the minis). 3 pack is £100 on their site (refurbished), AC2600 but no dedicated backhaul (I don't need it for our usage). It works slightly differently to how I expected - all of the dhcp and so on is on the modem\router, not on the bt devices, they are *only* working to expand wifi. I think there's pluses and minuses to that approach, but the wifi is working great
FWIW. I have the Virgin SH3 and the BT Premium Whole Home Wifi kit and managed to get them to talk nicely to each other. May be more by luck who knows ?
I left the Hub in Router mode but disabled the Wifi completely. The router provides DHCP. One of the BT disks is connected to the SH3. I have a PC in my office (located in the dormer) that is wired directly to the SH3. I have a TPLINK powerline also wired to the SH3 so that I can have another PC on the ground floor connected to the other end of the Powerline. The other BT discs are on the first floor and the ground floor and give excellent WiFi coverage for the wireless devices.
Can we sanity-check this please? Port 1 on the SH(it)3 is the top port, the bottom one is #4.
Mine is plugged into the bottom most Ethernet port. As per my previous post, it may be the physical location that is important or it maybe that that is the first (and only) port that I’ve used after putting it in modem only mode.
There’s a sequence in this post on the virgin media forums that is effectively what I did, though I didn’t use this particular post: Virgin Forums
The relevant bit is: “Put the VM hub into modem mode (see VM website for details) and wait for the base light to turn magenta. Once it’s in modem mode, the VM hub must then be powered off. Then, set up your own router with the WAN port set to be in DHCP mode. Make sure it’s fully initialised (leave 5 min) and then put in the WAN cable into the VM hub. Now power up the VM hub and leave a few minutes and you should get a connection. This order only needs to be done the first time you connect your own router to the VM hub.”
HTH
it maybe that that is the first (and only) port that I’ve used after putting it in modem only mode.
If that's true it'd go a long way to explaining the weirdness I was seeing.
There’s a sequence in this post on the virgin media forums that is effectively what I did
Honestly, if it's that arsey then it's more trouble than it's worth to fiddle with any further now that it's working. But thank you (both) for the info, appreciated.
I left the Hub in Router mode but disabled the Wifi completely.
Exactly how I ended up also.
Just as a coda to this,
I'm now in Modem mode and I think I know what the problem was.
I tried to set up Plex tonight and it was having none of it, long story short I think the reason was that it was double-NATting. After a wedge of time attempting to configure things like port-forwarding I almost threw the Tenda into Bridge mode (binning half of its features) before suddenly going "wait a cotton-picking minute..."
In Modem mode the VR router disables all bar one of the Ethernet ports. There seems to be some confusion over whether it's Port 1 or the 'bottom port' which is Port 4 and if you look at many support forums they talk about it being pernickety over device boot orders but then thought: what if it's nothing to do with any of that and the activated switchport is simply the first one to respond?
All along I've variously had connected the Virgin TV box, the Xbox, a laptop being used for testing... I ripped it all out bar the primary node, slung the VM box into Modem mode with nary a care for boot order and boom, five minutes later it's all working perfectly and faster than greased squirrel shit.