Affordable WiFi 6 router?

WJA96 said:
Openreach ECI 061513 (1b) or Huawei HG612 modem will work. Should be £10-£20 on the 'bay. Also Draytek Vigor 130 but that's £85 new so £40 used for no appreciable benefit.

You'll need your PPPoE login details from Vodafone if you don't already have them.
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I bought an Openreach ECI. It arrived today so have just set it up. Plugged it in and it synced the DSL connection in about a minute. Plugged in my router and eventually managed to switch it to PPPoE mode and entered the credentials and it worked!

Thanks again for the advice.
 
Just purchased a couple of Huawei AX3 wifi6 routers to see if I could use them to provide better wifi than my sky hub and its mesh setup via minis.

I had been using powerline av2000 which were fantastic in the old house but some quirks with wiring and my house extensions meant my office/games room was in a wifi deadzone and powerline was only providing 40Mb from my fibre :(

I know the ax3 are cheap at £100 a pair and not the fastest out there but wifi has never worked in any house I have had, so a bit of a punt, I still try each new standard now and again to see if there is improvement, this one has worked a treat, whilst it doesn't trump powerline over distance in the powerline ideal spots I know have at least 200Mb via wifi around the whole house, the key one for me from router to my office I now get almost 500Mb now, a bit of a win, even the sky hub with booster midway through the house was patchy to the kitchen making it 50/50 if you'd ever get TV, no such problem with these AX3, makes me wish I spent more on the faster gear now, so I could double the speed to my nas but I'm happy.

It also seems to play fair load balancing when I am raping max connect with steam, it doesn't kill the net for everyone like the old setup and shares it nicely without a big latency spike also.

It was a challenge getting the sky mini to work but once the routers were linked and I disabled sky wifi we got there.

Now I need faster internet to saturate my new found speed :D
 
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JollyJamma said:
Can I just say thank you for this recommendation?

I got the Hono(u)r 3 router and it’s amazing for the price. Yes, there are better routers out there but not for anything close to the price I paid.

I paid £50 for a router that does what it says on the tin. Easy to use, far better networking than the potato BT sent me and just a great little deal.
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Agreed. It's the absolute bargain of the decade at the moment. WiFi6 for everyone.
 
JollyJamma said:
Can I just say thank you for this recommendation?

I got the Hono(u)r 3 router and it’s amazing for the price. Yes, there are better routers out there but not for anything close to the price I paid.

I paid £50 for a router that does what it says on the tin. Easy to use, far better networking than the potato BT sent me and just a great little deal.
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Yeah its decent for me, I only use it for the Quest 2, everything else connects to the old router. :)
 
I think the Honor and the huawei I have are the same, certainly look almost identical been running mine for a little while now they work really well have 3 in a mesh, two with a wired backhaul, now after using them wirelessly for a while as these don't have dedicated wifi backhaul so just reducing some of the wifi load, I had no issues at all with just wifi, just getting a bit more performance out of the ones last in the chain by making some of the ealier ones quicker. all works well devices pop from AP to AP no problem.

The only flaw I found which may be the same on the honour, if you don't have wired backhaul and just use the 5G repeater mesh if you change a wifi setting on the main router, you will lose the routers which are wifi connected but have LAN devices, you have to unplug lan devices let it connect to mest and plug 'em back it, a wifi only unit is fine as are ones wired from wan port back to main AP.
 
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I am thinking about buying a new router. I've just started to look in earnest.

I'm currently using an old Billion 7800n http://billion.uk.com/product/wireless/7800n.htm It's actually okay, but is starting to creak a little esp when streaming to two devices and the WiFi is a little patchy, which is annoying for my other half when she's zooming on the sofa, which happens to be a bit of a flaky patch.

We've got no WiFi6 devices though, I stream to the TV using a laptop which is ac/a/b/g/n, we use iphones (7 & 8) and iPads (mini 4 & Air 2) so all old kit really.

Is it likely we will we see any improvements with the Honour?
 
You will see a speed up with respect to handling requests, these things have pretty strong processors in them, think the honour is Dual core and the Huawei quad core. you'll have the ability to handle more 2.4G streams and open up 5G as an option, 5G doesn't travel as far but the beauty here is you can add another and significantly improve coverage and speed.

Whilst testing I was pulling in two separate 10Gb files while interactively working on graphics stuff on a VPN, laptop was pulling in ~1.3Gbps more than 1Gb LAN speeds over the air nice, and that was from a 160Mhz Wave2 Wifi 5 device, granted it was only 3m from router but I was impressed, as it did that whilst only adding ~10ms latency to my VPN, my Sky hub would just lock up the network.

When I daisy chained them wirelessly so AX3 front room -> AX3 office -> upstairs games room AX3 through a number of brick walls there was clearly drop off but the furthest point would still see > 100Mb/s despite no backhaul support and lots of back and forth traffic hopping through devices
 
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inogen said:
I am thinking about buying a new router. I've just started to look in earnest.

I'm currently using an old Billion 7800n http://billion.uk.com/product/wireless/7800n.htm It's actually okay, but is starting to creak a little esp when streaming to two devices and the WiFi is a little patchy, which is annoying for my other half when she's zooming on the sofa, which happens to be a bit of a flaky patch.

We've got no WiFi6 devices though, I stream to the TV using a laptop which is ac/a/b/g/n, we use iphones (7 & 8) and iPads (mini 4 & Air 2) so all old kit really.

Is it likely we will we see any improvements with the Honour?
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Heck yes.
 
You would be buying a UK model from Huawei UK site there, so won't have the additional signal amplifiers of the Chinese model people talk about (I think, I don't actually know) but coverage is fine, obviously plenty of factors impact that so YMMV.

No manuals in the box Oddly but quite straight forward.
 
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sandys said:
You would be buying a UK model from Huawei UK site there, so won't have the additional signal amplifiers of the Chinese model people talk about (I think, I don't actually know) but coverage is fine, obviously plenty of factors impact that so YMMV.

No manuals in the box Oddly but quite straight forward.
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Pulled the trigger on it. Hopefully will keep my other half happy watching iPlayer whilst I watch the footy. Got plenty of broadband bandwidth but not so much on wifi.
 
inogen said:
Pulled the trigger on it. Hopefully will keep my other half happy watching iPlayer whilst I watch the footy. Got plenty of broadband bandwidth but not so much on wifi.
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Hope it works out for you, nothing more annoying than when the missus can't get internets :D we lost our line a couple of weeks ago, enclosure got damp and froze, you'd thing the world had ended.

Thing to bear in mind if you are having range issues with your current setup, this might not improve it as your router is 2.4G, 2.4G has greater range and penetration than 5G, so if you want to take advantage of 5G wifi bandwidth over a good area in your house router positioning is key, stuffed in a corner in another room etc won't help and if you need more coverage you can use another to run a mesh setup, really nice to setup.
 
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