Consumer/Pro-sumer Mesh Network

dlockers · Monday at 10:04

Hi folks,

I am perfectly happy with my current Archer C80 and RE550 boosters, but they are starting to show their age and they don't support daisy chain boosting (and that sounds bad anyway). I ideally want a router with a VPN end-point like my mums TP Link, and a proper Mesh that supports ethernet backhaul as I aim to get down the bottom of the garden.

Is there anything materially better in a similar budget to the Deco range?

Use case:
~37 connected devices
1 gaming PC
1 HA server
1 Plex server (rarely used)

I have ethernet to the bottom of the garden via a PoE switch which powers my cameras. I guess I could upgrade this to gigabit, but latency wise it's probably fine for Teams calls if I migrate to the home office.

Thanks
and apols for the boring Q

Avalon · Monday at 10:43

On router VPN tends to suck without hardware acceleration, however it depends what you need out of it, you will generally get much, much better results running something efficient like tailscale or wireguard on a PC/server, docker makes this easy, if you must run OVPN then it's still going to be a heck of a lot quicker on a CPU with hardware acceleration. The TP Link Deco's are actually surprisingly not awful, they have more hardware revisions than I care to think about, occasionally forget they're connected via wired backhaul, but they're easy to live with and stable. The basic X20/x50 will give 800mbit from my testing node to node, not much point in going for faster units as you're still limited by gigabit until you spend silly money on the higher end units. Also if you have a feed to the bottom of the garden, if that's in an office or building then just move the PoE switch to the other end and take a feed off for a Deco at that end. Sadly one of the annoyances of Deco is they aren't PoE capable officially, but like most things I suspect it could be done with minimal effort.

I run a mixed environment of Deco's with the odd Unifi AP, I also tend to install Deco's for family, they give very little agro and are easily managed/expanded as required.

Mr_Orange · Monday at 10:45

I'm currently using Asus XT8 on wired backhaul that have been good. It has VPN capabilities but I don't use that side of it so I can't really comment. The biggest downside is that they are expensive for what they are.

I have heard good things about Deco too.

dlockers · Monday at 10:55

Avalon said:
On router VPN tends to suck without hardware acceleration, however it depends what you need out of it, you will generally get much, much better results running something efficient like tailscale or wireguard on a PC/server, docker makes this easy, if you must run OVPN then it's still going to be a heck of a lot quicker on a CPU with hardware acceleration. The TP Link Deco's are actually surprisingly not awful, they have more hardware revisions than I care to think about, occasionally forget they're connected via wired backhaul, but they're easy to live with and stable. The basic X20/x50 will give 800mbit from my testing node to node, not much point in going for faster units as you're still limited by gigabit until you spend silly money on the higher end units. Also if you have a feed to the bottom of the garden, if that's in an office or building then just move the PoE switch to the other end and take a feed off for a Deco at that end. Sadly one of the annoyances of Deco is they aren't PoE capable officially, but like most things I suspect it could be done with minimal effort.

I run a mixed environment of Deco's with the odd Unifi AP, I also tend to install Deco's for family, they give very little agro and are easily managed/expanded as required.

Thanks. It is my go-to for family/friends as well. The ethernet backhaul is brilliant, and the mini switch helps get around port limitation where you are re-using old cables.

For VPN, I just like the security of getting into my home network when the server dies/needs a reboot or RealVNC fails. Definitely not used regularly.

Mr_Orange said:
I'm currently using Asus XT8 on wired backhaul that have been good. It has VPN capabilities but I don't use that side of it so I can't really comment. The biggest downside is that they are expensive for what they are.

I have heard good things about Deco too.

Yeah a quick Google puts them a bit out of reach.

---

I think rather than overegging it, I'll wait until Prime Day and go for something like:

TP Link Deco S4 - AC1200 ~£115 WiFi5
TP Link Deco X10 - AX1500 - £161 WiFi6
TP Link Deco X20 - AX1800 - £200 WiFi 6 but quad-core 1Ghz CPU