Current mesh system of choice?

I have Virgin Fibre with a Hub 3 router. The fibre connection is great, the WiFi isn’t and when connected to the Virgin plug in repeater it gets really bad. I believe I can switch the router to modem mode and plug in my own mesh routers to it.

Any recommendations for a reasonably priced fit and forget system? I’d want to start with 3 “units” (access points?), one next to the router obviously and the other 2 have ethernet cables run to the locations.

I also have Sonos which seems to sometimes be fussy but most a ethernet wired and I’m using Sonos NET for the others so they shouldn’t be connecting to the WiFi.

Cheers

I use TP Link Deco discs (5 of them).

I plug all my Bluesound streamers directly into them, and the music is solid with no dropouts. The Deco app is fine for monitoring usage and setting usage/time limits for the kids.

TP Link Deco mesh here as well. Only two tower hobbies but rock solid WiFi across my Victorian semi.

Went from netgear orbi – fantastic coverage, terrible UI and when the satellites lost connections to the main router/hub it was a pain to troubleshoot- to TP-LINK Deco.  Full house coverage on wifi backhaul and another one in the shed on Ethernet. Just zero issues in the 18 months we’ve had them.

Had FTTP installed in March and the Deco’s are good at punting data round at to the 900 meg connection we have.

TP-Link Deco (the cylindrical tower ones) solved all our wi-fi problems.
You can fiddle about with them if you want or just leave them be. Every now and again you’ll get a message saying there’s an update available, but that’s about it.

Tp link deco

Cool. So unanimous votes for deco.

Like this one?

https://amzn.eu/d/iwsujvq

3 x Gigabit port.

2.4 & 5GHz.

I have a Multy mesh system because a techy friend gifted me the first couple.

They seem to get poor reviews but frankly they’ve been great. I now have 3 around the house (as well as the one plugged into the router) and they’ve been very good with only one issue after a power cut when I had to reset them.

Ubiquiti Unifi. Mine are UAP-AC-PRO.

@phil5556 – yeah, like those ones ??

Ordered cheers

Deco seems the STW system of choice. I’ll throw in my suggestion of ASUS. I have a pair of ASUS Zen devices and an old AC-86. There’s some interoperability of ASUS routers in the MESH setup so you can mix and match to a degree.

Important thing will be whether you have hardwired backbone or need to have wireless backbone. This is how the individual MESH access points share the connection.

If you can connect your access points with cat5e, or better, cabling that’ll be best. You only need a dual band MESH system for this.

If you need a wireless backbone then get a 3 band MESH system that will let you devote one band to the backbone. This leaves the others for your devices.

TP-link do deco tri-band systems. ASUS do tri-band systems too.

Ta. The Deco I’ve gone for is dual band and I do have ethernet cables at each point that I want them, so I should be good to go 🙂

Here’s how my Virgin 250 is currently running…

‘Ping 35ms’!?!

Edit: those aren’t great results.

Is that at some random point in the house? Or in the same room as the primary router?

Looks like SpeedTest has picked Douglas as the test point. Do you live in the IoM?

Edit: those aren’t great results.

I’d be happy with them. We get about 12mb down, 1mb up.

Standard FTTC broadband, but the cabinet is miles away.

Well after a reboot of the router this is better.

Like i say, the actual speed to the router and over Ethernet is fine and sometimes the wifi is fine too, this is my phone just now.

Sounds like you’ve made solid choices all round – another happy Deco user here.

If your Virgin modem doesn’t offer you the option of “Router Mode” in the admin page, you probably need to ring up Virgin support and tell them. I believe it’s something about enabling IPv4; usually takes a couple of minutes, once you get through to support

If your Virgin modem doesn’t offer you the option of “Router Mode”

Modem Mode is what you’re looking for, as the OP himself suggested.  On the Hub 3 at least, the status light goes a fetching magenta colour when this is applied (a week later, when it’s finally completed rebooting).

Of note here is that when in modem mode the hub will support one and only one Ethernet connection, anything else will have to go via the TP-Link devices.  That little gem took me days to diagnose, the Internet is awash with misinformation.

Timely thread this one, as I have also been looking to upgrade. Our Netgear router is getting bit flakey, even with latest firmware. We have been running it with a Netgear extender, which is OK, but won’t reach to the garden. So I think it’s time for a mesh system.

I have been looking at this TP-Link one  as its got the Tri-band facility that @prettygreenparrot  mentioned above as I will struggle to have the backbone hardwired.  Its bit more money but I would rather spend a bit more and make sure it works, stable and future proofed as best you can.

XE75 Tri ban

I did look at the new TP-Link WiFi 7, but they are really spendy. ?‍♂️

TP link deco X-20 here, also on virgin.

My laptop on wifi is getting in a room that’s not got a wifi box in it

265Mbps down

25Mbps up

I’m pretty happy with that, big improvement over just the virgin box or a cheaper mesh system

Just wanted to highlight that I looked for a set recently and John Lewis matched the Amazon price for the set I bought, so worth considering a useful UK seller rather than Bezos of you can!

Too late, Bezos has delivered and it’s all up and running.

3 wired Decos, painless set up. Fingers crossed it stays that way.

This from a previously terrible part of the house 🙂

Just wanted to highlight that I looked for a set recently and John Lewis matched the Amazon price for the set I bought, so worth considering a useful UK seller rather than Bezos of you can!

cheers I’ll remember that

I also have a Deco system and find is ok but not amazing. For example I have 300mbps up 300mbps down at the router, but that seems to drop to 100 up, 100 down in the living room, despite trying a variety of positions with the 3 nodes I have.

100 up, 100 down is still good but annoying to lose that much speed through the Decos. They seem to have quite a limited range to get their sweet spot. Eg if I go and stand near the mode that feeds the living room I get 220 down, yet if I walk about 6 steps into the living room it drops to 100 mbps as mentioned

I bought a set of 3 TP-Link Decos a few weeks ago which I installed on our Virgin Hub 3 router, set in modem only mode.

I get very good coverage around the house and garage now but I get the feeling it’s not as fast as it could be. When I look at the Deco app on my phone it shows “Everything looks good” with dynamic speeds like 105kbps down to 1 kbps. I don’t know what it’s measuring but it doesn’t sound a lot.

This week I was on a Zoom call (1st for years) which was very stuttery and I kept getting messages “Internet connection is unstable” yet my laptop is about 6 inches away from the Deco which is plugged into the Virgin hub.

And can anyone recommend a speed tester that will work with my setup?

dynamic speeds like 105kbps

That is poor for a download or upload speed imo.
I see >250Mbps most everywhere most times I test except the cellar and the edges of the garden. That’s with 500Mbps up and down at the primary router. Most places inside the house are 300-500 Mbps

105kbps is a credible value for actual data traffic – that is the rate of data movement at a point in time. After all, you’re not watching 4K movies streamed on all devices at the same time.

Work laptops ime use VPNs of varying quality. Mine is limited to about 100Mbps up and down and its ping and latency are somewhat longer than my own devices with no VPN.

I favor the Ookla Speedtest app for checking device connection speeds to Internet servers. The website works OK too.

I do have a ThinkBroadband quality monitor running.

The ASUS mesh has a built in ookla app that tests the connection at the primary router. This is the first point of entry and usually comes out at just above the bought speed (thanks BRSK).

You might want to check which router your laptop connects to. Despite mesh blah blah it is the client that determines what access point it connects to. And devices sometimes make weird choices, hanging on to a distant router when there’s one closer.

Edit. Warnings from zoom, or Teams in case, are not always helpful. Sometimes indicating local connectivity problems, VPN problems, server problems, CPU overload, …. Turn it off and then on again? Then do the same with the routers and modem?

And can anyone recommend a speed tester that will work with my setup?

Compare testing when hardwired to router versus on device in question over wifi. Standard Ookla speed test really gives you all you need, but if you want to go a bit deeper there try this; https://speed.cloudflare.com/ Even though it goes into much more detail it does give a layman’s summary score.

For voice/video calls, latency under load is an important one – that’s how responsive the connection is while shuffling data around. It’s shown in Ookla – in the image up thread it’s the 401/36 ping figures with down/up arrows being latency under download and upload respectively (401 ms is pretty bad, just checked and mine is 20 ms).

Thanks for the advice. I just watched the numbers on the Deco app on my phone while playing a YouTube vid on the laptop and I was getting 4mbps at times, so that’s more like it.

And I’ll download the Ookla app.