Mesh Wifi?

[Ian]

I'm struggling a bit with the Wifi at home. I have a hotch-potch of power line adapters and a WiFi range extender in the house.

The problem is that the house is divided in almost equal halves by a 2 foot stone wall. French electrical wiring is different to the UK and we have two separate circuits for each side of the house, so that's one breaker unit in the kitchen, where the meter is and where the power comes in, and there is a second breaker panel in the other half of the house. Although the electricity for the second half of the house comes from the same source in the kitchen, powerline adapters in the kitchen half of the house are very slow or non-functional when plugged in on one side of the house with the router's powerline adapter in the other half of the house.

The main router is upstairs because our broadband comes down a dual-phase directional 4G antenna in the roof. So my current arrangement to provide Wifi to the other side of the house is to use a range extender on the upstairs landing, which 'shines' through the door that connects the two sides of the house. The upstairs floors are alos able to let Wifi signal through. It works but depending on where you are on the other side of the house there are some dead-spots and you lost a fair chunk of the available bandwidth. I also have another access point near the window downstairs in order that the car outside gets a signal as this is important for the Tesla.

I've taken care to ensure that the Wifi channels being used don't clash, but there are three SSIDs and the setup is far from ideal. So I'm thinking of replacing all this with a Mesh Wifi system - one main unit with two satellites.

I've done a lot of research and the Tenda MW12 looks like an affordable solution which has the features and performance I need.

Has anyone here moved to Mesh Wifi - how did you get on?

Ian

[Steambuff]

Hi,
I had similar problems to you where I got no coverage in parts of the house.

We live in a old converted Hayloft (circa 1750) which had been extended in the 1980's.
The original Hayloft has 2ft thick stone walls, both internal and external (Kitchen, Dining Room and Rear Bedrooms), while the modern extension is of block construction (Lounge, Front Bedrooms, Study)
I tried extenders etc but had issues with phones/tablets dropping signel while switching between units.

So I went for the Amazon eero system - 1 Master in the Study and 3 Slaves in the Lounge, Hall and Sun-Room off the rear of the Dining Room. This also gives coverage in the detached garage - my workshop. Parts of the Front and Rear Garden also has coverage.

I have had no problems since installing it. I plugged the master into my Broadband Router (Disabling its own Wii-Fi).

Regards

Dave

[linus1884]

Is routing cat5 ethernet cabling an option? Either under floorboards or via the ceiling?

Mesh WiFi is great but you may still end up with deadzones? Although you could then just additional satelllites?

Have you done a floorplan with where you can place the satellites to gain maximum coverage? ideally next to a plug socket?

[Ian]

Hi,
I had similar problems to you where I got no coverage in parts of the house.

We live in a old converted Hayloft (circa 1750) which had been extended in the 1980's.
The original Hayloft has 2ft thick stone walls, both internal and external (Kitchen, Dining Room and Rear Bedrooms), while the modern extension is of block construction (Lounge, Front Bedrooms, Study)
I tried extenders etc but had issues with phones/tablets dropping signel while switching between units.

So I went for the Amazon eero system - 1 Master in the Study and 3 Slaves in the Lounge, Hall and Sun-Room off the rear of the Dining Room. This also gives coverage in the detached garage - my workshop. Parts of the Front and Rear Garden also has coverage.

I have had no problems since installing it. I plugged the master into my Broadband Router (Disabling its own Wii-Fi).

Regards

Dave

That's very encouraging.

Ian

[Ian]

Is routing cat5 ethernet cabling an option? Either under floorboards or via the ceiling?

Mesh WiFi is great but you may still end up with deadzones? Although you could then just additional satelllites?

Have you done a floorplan with where you can place the satellites to gain maximum coverage? ideally next to a plug socket?

No, ethernet cabling would be very impractical.

The house plan is very simple, the kitchen downstairs and master bedroom/bathroom upstairs form one half of the house and two further bedrooms and the living room (downstairs) are in the other half, with two-foot walls all around and dividing the two halves. There is a larger than normal door providing access from the kitchen to the living room and upstairs there is a smaller door going through the central wall off the landing. The upstairs floor isn't very thick and is mostly made of wood.

My plan is to put one satellite on the router upstairs, one on the landing and the second in the kitchen. The kitchen satellite would 'see' the one on the upstairs landing (about 15 feet apart with a plasterboard wall separating them) and that would see the router unit. So they would be daisy chained. The middle one would connect to the router unit and the kitchen unit but the router and kitchen units would only communicate with the central one on the landing.

This might not be enough to reach the car outside so I'd probably maintain that access point I currently use for that, which is connected to the router using powerline adapters.

Ian

[linus1884]

That looks like you have everything covered!

I was going to ask about the Mesh hybrid system which also has powerline build in to help coverage at extreme opposite of both sides of the house and outdoors.

Would seem line of sight with the satellites will yield the best speed results and coverage.

[blu-by-u]

I run the TP-Link Deco S4 in my house. Pretty easy to setup. I use the triangle to cover the whole house. The main in one, roughly the S4 sits in the 2 other corners. No wires other than the power to the S4 units. BUT you must set up the S4 within the WiFi cover area.

[Ian]

I've just read that daisy chaining works but it's not as optimal as a star topology, with all the satellites communicating with the router-connected unit. I might be able to run some ethernet cable from where the 4G modem router is to the primary unit at a different location to enable with the two satellite units to communicate with the router unit.

Ian

[Walti]

Mesh systems work very well, used them for lighting, refrigeration and HVAC applications for work.

go for one that is expandable so that you can add another remote station if needed.

Metal framed, partitioned and clad buildings are probably worse than stone (reflected radio waves) and they always worked!

As someone else has already said the incoming modem/router will probably need its Wi-Fi switched off and a new base station connected by cable to it (get a very short Ethernet cable so you don’t have masses of cables to hide)

Do be aware that you get what you pay for with these devices and some of the cheaper ones aren’t a true mesh as they don’t give you one continuous wi fi system but several individual ones

[Ian]

Mesh systems work very well, used them for lighting, refrigeration and HVAC applications for work.

go for one that is expandable so that you can add another remote station if needed.

Metal framed, partitioned and clad buildings are probably worse than stone (reflected radio waves) and they always worked!

As someone else has already said the incoming modem/router will probably need its Wi-Fi switched off and a new base station connected by cable to it (get a very short Ethernet cable so you don’t have masses of cables to hide)

Do be aware that you get what you pay for with these devices and some of the cheaper ones aren’t a true mesh as they don’t give you one continuous wi fi system but several individual ones

Yes, I've done my homework - the Tenda MW12 is tri-band so the back-haul channel won't use up bandwidth on the user channels. It's much faster than our current broadband but I do have a NAS box and I'm hoping we will get fibre broadband soon!

Ian

[Ian]

A quick update, I found a good deal on the Tenda Nova MW12 AC1200 triband kit with three units and installed it yesterday - everything is running brilliantly. The broadband here is limited to about 90 megabits as we're using 4G for our connection via a rooftop antenna (and the mast is 5km away), but fibre is being installed in the area and it's already in our lane. As soon as it's made live the mesh network will really come into its own with the faster speeds. But for now, at last we have a stable network with just one SSID across the whole house and no dead-spots. I highly recommend it!

Ian

[Walti]

Glad it’s all working well for you, as soon as you get true fibre at 100Mb/s+ you’ll be flying, what is the max speed of the mesh? Some top out at lower speeds than you can get for fibre so the mesh system becomes the bottle neck!

[Ian]

Walti Here are the Tech Advisor website review results:

[Walti]

Excellent a proper up to a gigabit system to max out!

Im guessing the mesh is a nominal 500Mb system, so will be the limit of the system.

Even the garden is fast enough for day to day use!