Subscribe now and choose from over 30 free gifts worth up to £49 - Plus get £25 to spend in our shop
I've had a Deco Mesh system for about 2 years now - I'm in an old house with thick walls, so 3 Deco X55s hardwired together works v well. They're in Access Point mode, as I have a dedicated router handling all the routing/ firewall/ etc. And last year I added 2 more Decos (cheaper M4s) just to fill in the gaps in the wifi, and it all worked fine - the fast roaming worked well etc.Â
I ended up completely resetting and rebuilding the Deco network a couple of months back, and have it set up exactly as it was, but it's a bit buggy now - devices drop off the network, fast roaming doesn't work etc. The settings on the Deco are all as they were, the router's unchanged, and I can't work out wtf is the problem.Â
Any suggestions/ recommendations/ experiences of this?!
Mine went a bit wobbly after a couple of years. I ended up doing what you did and rebuilding from scratch. Not easy as some of the Deco's refused to re-join the mesh! Got it al going eventually and it's been fine since. Â The only difference is I use the main Deco as teh internet router so the mesh is in router mode.
Before we had the badged BeFibre router as the internet termination, and I was running two routed networks (not bridged) which just seemed pointlessly complex. I'm not a fan of A-P mode, but that's probably just historic issues with spanning tree networks back in the day 😉
One thing I found is it's very hard to diagnose. There's no good event logger and it sounds like you have just random events. All I can recommend is you rebuild it again. Maybe start with the wired ones and see if you get issues, before adding wireless x55s?
I ended up completely resetting and rebuilding the Deco network a couple of months back, and have it set up exactly as it was, but it's a bit buggy now
What happened that led you to resetting it? Â
Changed ISPs, and the ISP-supplied modem's bridge mode was a bit of a nightmare. Eventually just wired the ONT directly to the router; but in the process of working out what was wrong, ended up rebuilding the network from scratch.Â
Alex, good points - and yeah, the lack of much Deco interface is part of the reason why I have a 'proper' router on the back end. I do wonder whether the Decos would stop misbehaving in router mode, but I need a free afternoon with nobody online to tinker with it all. In the meantime, resetting and rebuilding it again is probably a good idea*.
*Dear lord it's frustrating though. "Connect your Deco and wait until it's flashing blue" OK. "cannot find new Deco" it's right there, literally wired into the main one, flashing blue. "cannot find Deco" OK, well after 5 minutes I'll just reset the new Deco. "found Deco, is this yours" Oh FFS, I've just reset it, so now you can't connect to it!Â
We've all been there with cheap wifi - eventually we all end up just biting the bullet and investing in Ubiquiti unifi devices. a bit more expensive but whats the cost of your time spent trying to get a cheap system working reliably. buy it, you won't regret itÂ
What's your dedicated router? Does it play nice with the Decos? Especially if your asking the router to manage someone elses mesh.
I've got an Asus AIMesh set up with a router and 3 APs (wired) hasn't missed a beat in any of it's various versions, including the ones where i've used custom add ons to do feature that was "coming soon". The system has been running 8 or 9 years now.
(To be fair, it was only about 6 weeks between "coming soon" and built into the latest update...)
Good question. TP-Link Archer; it's been pretty solid until recently.Â
I'd do what you suggest and just snip the Archer out of the system for a while, see if the Decos can manage on their own?
A quick google says that deco can work with archer, but aren't designed to?