Viewing 33 posts - 81 through 113 (of 113 total)
  • Mesh WiFi talk to me
  • timmys
    Full Member

    you don’t need a separate backhaul channel for web browsing. With 11mpps broadband you won’t come even close to maxing out the slowest, single channel mesh. I wouldn’t get one of those (as dual band improves availability), but the sort of thing you have suggested is fine.

    Probably all true. Personally, I always try and buy stuff that is on the overkill side for my current situation. I aim to future proof and keep stuff for a long time, as the disposable nature of stuff that is just about good enough isn’t my bag. I’d also say it is very easy to underestimate what you are asking of a wifi network. If you’d have asked me I would had said I probably had about 10 devices. Looking at the Plume app now it is telling me I have 27 devices connected, and has seen a total of 47 in the past 30 days (I guess some of that is down to some devices sporadically changing their MAC address for privacy though).

    johndoh
    Free Member

    Do you guys all have massive houses or something? A single standard BT router covers my whole 4 bedroom house with no problem.

    I am finding increasing issues with four of us working/schooling from home (1,800 sq. ft. 4 bed detached) with 2 x laptops, 2 x iPads, 4 x iPhones, 2 x TVs, 3 x music devices all connected to the wireless set-up (although not necessarily all being used at the same time) – that’s superfast Virgin Fibre on a v.3 Virgin Hub. The wired connection gets 80+ mbps but wireless connections are usually around 15mbps but sometimes drop to <1mbps.

    prettygreenparrot
    Full Member

    I’m also toying with the Virgin SH4 and Giga package as it’ll only be a £6 a month cost increase in costs and should up the wifi speeds as a base unit.  Someone please correct me if I’m talking pish

    +£6 seems fair. However, first check your bandwidth use over a few days. Why pay +£6 for gigabit (and the one-off fee for the SH4) if you’re regularly under, say, 300Mbps? The upload speed is still only 50Mbps.

    Having said that, I’ve found the SH4 to be more reliable than the SH3 and there are some occasions when we hit the bandwidth limit. IRL I’ll likely downgrade to 500Mbps or 350Mbps when #1 child leaves home next year.

    FWIW my setup is ASUS MESH-based:

    AX92U as the main router connected to the VM SH4 in modem mode, then 2 AC67Us and an AC86U connected with an ethernet Gb backhaul.

    Aside from one of the AC67Us disappearing a few times off the network a couple of months back it’s been good. Naturally the AC67U that dropped off was the one closest to my children’s rooms and resulted in much woe. Resetting it and setting it back up as a node was simple and no problems since.

    Nearly as good as MESH though has been installing a Pi-hole DNS + Unbound. Makes web browsing faster and less annoying.

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    perchypanther
    Free Member

    Bumpty bump, anyone got any notes (good or bad) on my post above please?

    Tenda Nova MW3 user. It’s only fallen over once in the last 4 months and a quick restart sorted it. Otherwise it’s been flawless.

    My house is constructed of entirely of radio wave blocking materials so I need 6 nodes to get full coverage of the house.

    There are currently 5 users (2 adults and 3 home schooling high school kids) all doing Teams / video calls with no performance problems.

    Recommended for the el-cheapo bargain price.

    Philby
    Full Member

    Another recent Tenda Nova MW3 user here. Prior to getting the mesh system I had upgraded from a Virgin “Superhub” 2 to a “Superhub” 3 (quotation marks as it’s anything but super). With the Superhub 2 I could get some coverage in my rear bedroom / office but anything using a lot of bandwidth often dropped off. The Superhub 3 was even worse with absolutely no coverage into the rear bedroom/office. The MX3 mesh, with one box connected to the Superhub 3 and a box in the front and back bedrooms, has improved coverage throughout the house and means I can actually work in my bedroom/office rather than the kitchen. They are pretty cheap at around £80 but I’m not sure I would benefit that much more by buying a system over 200 quid.

    el_boufador
    Full Member

    @johndoe that’s pretty much exactly representative of my situation / problems.
    Virgin 3 hub, struggling to keep up with demand. Lots of strange drop outs and problems to do with the router crapping out, rather than modem connection out to the internet

    oldtennisshoes
    Full Member

    Virgin SH3 (350 mb package) with Tenda MW6s here. Router is in modem only mode and the first Tenda unit is doing the dns and routering bits. I’ve also got a cable out to the other end of the house with another MW6 doing the same there.
    Speed in the room with the first unit is the full 350 mb and it’s rarely sub 100 mb anywhere in the house.

    tldr Put the virgin hub in modem only mode and use something better

    Sandwich
    Full Member

    I left Virginmedia because of the hub 3 and this fault with the Intel Puma Chip .

    Wifi was atrocious and at times the modem was dropping out so much that streaming TV was impossible. No one would commit to a timescale for fixing it or when the next generation hub would arrive.

    johndoh
    Free Member

    Another Virgin Superhub 3 user here. I bought one of these last week and the difference has been amazing – from shaky (anything from <2mbps to >100mbps depending in its mood) to constant >100mbps across the whole house (we are on the 100mbps package). Also the app and its parental controls is very good.

    cb
    Full Member

    we use a VF router for wifi, which is patchy in some parts of the house, especially with the kids at home. From the router we have a network of cat cables that service some rooms in the house and my garden office. Stunning planning means that there are some rooms that have no cat cable and patchy wifi!

    Would one of these mesh systems play nicely with my existing set up i.e. would all the cat cables still work where they currently do and the mesh things just fill in the gaps?

    Coyote
    Free Member

    Went for the TP Link Deco 5 and very happy with it so far. Completely eliminated dead spots around the house and the speed is excellent.

    tonyd
    Full Member

    Google wifi here (precursor to Google mesh). Works really well, idiot proof set up and easy to manage devices etc. I’m on Virgin 350Mbps broadband with the router in modem mode, the Google kit takes care of everything else. I have 4 x pucks through the house which is slight overkill but kids are getting iPads and things now so usage is increasing, one in the garage for streaming stuff while on the turbo. I do have cat6 backhaul to each device but sure you can do without that.

    rockhopperbike
    Full Member

    To expand this thread, we have fibre to the house and in via the fibre “modem”, the isp is saying they use only PPOE, but the nest wifi router is dropping out all this time, Google support are adamant there is a VLAN tag( whatever that is) which is causing the drop out – I’m about to send the nest system back but need to have a wifi to replace it has anyone got any experience of wifi routers that play nicely with fibre optic modems that “VLAn” tag??

    Russell96
    Full Member

    I thought the ISP would be supplying a router not a modem? The modem would be the BT OpenReach ONT into which you plug the ISP router, then plug the main Nest into the router?

    Let the ISP router do the PPoE stuff, turn off Wi-Fi on it, leave DHCP on. Connect the main Nest unit to it on a LAN port on the ISP router and let it do the WiFI and DHCP for your network.

    rockhopperbike
    Full Member

    If I have understood it all, we have a ONT unit that has a cat 5 cable out to a low end router ( now removed ) so we have the nest router direct into the ONT box. Are you saying we put the “low end router” back in and then connect that to the nest via cat 5?

    Russell96
    Full Member

    Yes, but switch off the WiFi on the low end router, I’m going to hazard a guess that your ISP sent if out pre-configured to work with the BT FTTP. so it should just work, and all you have to do is turn Wifi off on the router but leave DHCP on.

    When you plug in your main Nest into the LAN port on the router, it should pick up an IP address from the DHCP pool on the router. For example:

    1: ISP router is 192.168.1.1/24
    2: Your main Nest WAN port (connected to the LAN port on the ISP router) 192.168.1.10/24
    3: Nest WiFi main router is then 192.168.8.1
    4: Main Nest then gives IP Addresses to all your devices say 192.168.8.10/24 to 192.168.8.254/24

    Only gotcha I can see is ISP’s will skimp on their routers a bit, so it could get flaky/slow when you are hammering the FTTP, so if you are doing some serious upload/downloads all the time. Then a decent router might be more appropriate, that is capable of supporting your FTTP line rate. Said router just needs an Ethernet WAN port as they’ll all support PPoE as an Authentication method along with VLAN support. My personal recommendation is something from Draytek, as they do software support forever and a day on their devices. Something like the 2927 would work on FTTP upto 900Mbps full duplex. 2862 for 200Mbps or so (long term 2860 series user)

    Cougar
    Full Member

    Timely thread resurrection.

    I’ve given up with the Tenda units and they’re going back to Amazon for a refund, I saw my arse with them at the weekend. I should not be getting freeze-frame video calls on a 100Mbps cable Internet whilst sitting less than two metres away from the primary node. They’re just too flaky and the abject lack of configuration options is just astonishingly shit. Not what I was expecting from a supposedly premium product.

    Ho hum, back to the drawing board. Now what?

    rockhopperbike
    Full Member

    Ace – will give it a go!

    Russell96
    Full Member

    @Cougar I had some VC issues (Zoom only) on my Netgear Orbi AX mesh, turned out setting the CTS/RTS threshold to 2347 from the default sorted that. The AX Orbi hasn’t got lots of config options, but it just works.

    My only real tip is a system with a dedicated back-haul channel, as any system that hasn’t is crippling the wireless network be in affect operating in half duplex.

    I run my Cisco and Meraki test networks off LAN ports on the Sat units, no probs, and whilst my Meraki Wifi offers plenty of customisation, monitoring etc,, it doesn’t have that dedicated mesh back-haul, so cripples performance if you use it that way.

    Russ CCNP CCDP CMNA CECP and a few other wireless vendor certs but I don’t use them really

    Cougar
    Full Member

    (-: cheers.

    It’s not just VC, that was just the straw that broke the camel’s back. See my lengthy post on the previous page.

    I bought the Tenda WM12 pack which does have a dedicated backhaul. Running cables about isn’t practical and I didn’t want to piss away most of my bandwidth to repeater traffic. But it’s just feature-poor and unreliable, I’d be having conference calls with work and the laptop would suddenly declare that it had no Internet access, web etc would stop working but the voice call wouldn’t blip.

    It doesn’t help that I’m not really sure on best practice. We have Meraki and Cisco Wi-Fi kit at work but we’ve got the luxury of hoying Ethernet cables through the plenum (and a considerably bigger budget). Do I need a multi-node mesh, would two be better than three to avoid crosstalk, or should I just get a monster dead-spider style router? Who knows, I’m out of my comfort zone here. I don’t mind throwing money at the problem if it, y’know, actually solves the problem, conversely I don’t want to spunk money up the wall for no good reason if a cheaper solution is as good.

    Cougar
    Full Member

    Having spent the last two hours reading about network devices, such is the rock ‘n’ roll life I lead, I think I’m leaning towards a pair of ASUS CT8s.

    … or a big daft router.

    5lab
    Full Member

    just to add an answer to this – the BT whole home wifi mesh (mini and standard, not sure on the premium) just provide a wifi mesh, they have no routing or smart features. This does mean that the featureset is limited, but the flipside is they play well with any modem (as the modem is still doing the routing).

    Cougar
    Full Member

    So, what, they rely on the router for things like DHCP?

    I just looked at the BT discs, three mini discs are £75 or you can get two for £100…

    Cougar
    Full Member

    … a big daft router, yesterday.

    (The WIFI6 thing gets swallowed as backhaul if you use it as a primary mesh node, but I’m not overly sure as I care.)

    Coyote
    Free Member

    Hey Cougar. I put the Deco5 in as WiFi points only. The router still does DHCP etc. It works like a dream. Absolutely no issues whatsoever.

    sharkbait
    Free Member

    Hate to say it but having been using 3 x Google WiFi units for at least 18 months they’ve been faultless.
    Not full of features but simply works.

    5lab
    Full Member

    Yes, they rely on your router to do it. Pricing is all over thebplace, refurbished big disks are often less than £100 for 3

    el_boufador
    Full Member

    Cougar I went with the CT8s in the end. Very pleased so far. A couple of minor wobbles over the past 3 weeks (WiFi drop out to reconnect a minute later). Overall very stable though, and is worlds apart better than using the virgin hub as the router. Used to have daily drop outs, various wobbles like Ethernet or WiFi would just drop out, buffering telly.

    The ct8 controls/utilities also all good for me.

    jezzep
    Full Member

    Hiya,

    Using TP link Deco-9 very good never dropped and reliable. I like the detection of new devices and control. They are expensive but work seamlessly around our house and outside.

    BR
    JeZ

    ta11pau1
    Full Member

    Just had Three 5G broadband installed, all great with 120-150mbps download speeds.

    Only issue is the Huawei 5G CPE Pro router WiFi is shockingly bad – full speed next to the device but 25ft away it drops to 10mbps.

    Bought a TP link Deco M4 2 node system, installed yesterday and now getting full bars and 100+mpbs pretty much everywhere.

    Walked down the end of the garden (probably 200ft from the 2nd node) and was still getting 50mbps download.

    Dead easy to set up too, in AP mode as the 5g router doesn’t have a modem mode.

    Tallpaul
    Full Member

    I don’t profess to understand most of what you’re talking about in this thread, but I have Virgin 100mb fibre via their superhub and use BT Whole Home Wifi (the regular ones, not mini or premium).

    As I have a couple of devices wired to the superhub, I’m still running it in WiFi mode to keep all the ports active.

    It’s fine, I get good coverage and the reliability of Virgin is the limiting factor, the BT nodes seem pretty stable.

    https://shop.bt.com/products/bt-whole-home-wi-fi-088269-CDXH.html

    ta11pau1
    Full Member

    Your reply just got me really confused. Thought my username had changed. 😀

    Cougar
    Full Member

    Just as a coda to this,

    I bought an Asus RT-AX92U “dead spider” style router to replace my Tenda MW12 mesh, which arrived today.

    It claims 3500 square feet of coverage, my place is half that but the router is in a far corner so, it should work, right? All the ASUS stuff seems to interoperate and this is part of their mesh system so if it doesn’t reach and I want to add further mesh nodes then I can do so without requiring exact device matches or selling a kidney.

    It has a WIFI6 channel which has generated some ire in reviews because it can be used either as a mesh backhaul or for clients but not both. As I have neither of these things at this point in time, I don’t overly care. Plus the ink is still wet on the WIFI6 spec so double-meh.

    Unboxing, this is actually a premium product. It feels like taking an iPhone out of its packaging, what I previously thought were ‘premium’ Tendas suddenly look like cheap toys.

    Setting it up the Virgin hub was predictably a prick, it is an astonishingly shit piece of kit and I hate it to the core of my being. Once the WAN light on the ASUS finally went from red to white though:

    Game.

    Changer.

    Holy shit.

    It is clucking amazing. I have 200Mbps cable broadband, at the farthest point away from the router that I can possibly be without going outside or climbing into the loft I’m getting a solid 150Mbps. Even then that was me trying hard to get it to fail. And as previously mentioned, some of the internal walls here are two-foot thick rock.

    Control over settings is enterprise-grade. Address reservation, port forwarding, firewall, monitoring, load balancing, QoS, security filters, game optimisation… and I’m scratching the surface here. I’ve never seen this level of granular control either corporate or domestic that didn’t require a command line.

    This thing is incredible, and it’s saved me 50 quid over the 3-piece Tenda mesh I’m sending back.
    I’m mere hours into ownership right now but at this point in time I can’t recommend it hard enough.

Viewing 33 posts - 81 through 113 (of 113 total)

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