Mesh WiFi for both Virgin and BT?

squerble

squerble

squerble

Soldato
Joined
13 Apr 2009
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Location
UK
Hi all,

Just moved house, and struggling with WiFi. I’m in contract with VM for another year so brought my 1Gb connection. It’s the Superhub 4 which I run in modem mode, patched to a TPLink Archer A7 access point.

At my last place, it was easy to get a central location with the AP as there was a hardwire cable from the Virgin Media ingress upstairs which I just took over. Now at the new house, the VM ingress is at the very front corner of the house, and my gaming PC is sat on the first floor at the exact opposite corner of the house, which is a 3 bed detached. With both the Hub and AP sat in the front corner of the house, I’m struggling for 7Mb on my PC and about 20Mb on my MacBook.

I could find a reasonably central place for the AP upstairs around the stairs, but would mean drilling several holes, lifting floorboards, finding a way to get the power brick and cable tidy etc, and then run another cable to my PC. Alternatively, I was thinking about drilling two holes in the outside wall and running an Ethernet cable outside the house to the office to wire the PC but this seems both complicated and won’t solve the WiFi problem at the back of the house. So that now leans me towards some kind of mesh…

I’m happy to forego hard wiring the PC if I can get a good 150Mb+ on the WiFi in that room. So I’ll take straight recommendations for a mesh network which is towards the budget-end of the spectrum. However, I need to add a huge caveat that when I’m done with my VM contract I’ll very likely switch to BT (or something else that uses the BT network) as the house is FTTP, as I’m sure most are. I’ll also likely drop the incoming speed to 500Mb or whatever similar speed is offered at that time. I think I’d need maybe 2-3 nodes including the “main” node which will sit with the VM/BT modem.

Sorry for the ramble, but hoping some can help a frustrating situation :)
 
Just run the cable and get something like a Ruckus r320 from eBay… range and speed will serve the whole house easily. To get a strong mesh network, you need to spend a lot more money. Minimum you’d need for a reliable and fast mesh are something like 2x the r520 or r550 and that’ll set you back £1-1.5k
 
squerble said:
Alternatively, I was thinking about drilling two holes in the outside wall and running an Ethernet cable outside the house to the office to wire the PC but this seems both complicated and won’t solve the WiFi problem at the back of the house.
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This is the way :D If it's your own home, don't settle for anything less than the best you can possibly get. Well worth the time and investment. Cat6 cables and the accessories to have your PC hardwired will cost you barely £40 say.

In terms of sorting WiFi for other devices in the home, if you do a Cat6 run (I'd do 2 runs tbh) to your man cave - also get yourself a 2 piece mesh wifi kit, but you can then hardwire it so your backhaul is directly connected and you lose no bandwidth. This will mean your wifi coverage is hugely improved with an AP at both ends of the house, and your PC is hardwired so can get the full 1Gb from your connection.

Also means in the future if you switch to Openreach FTTP, your home is already Cat6 wired so if OR fit your ONT in the same location where VM came in, it's easy to get your network back online as it was.
 
Sparx said:
This is the way :D If it's your own home, don't settle for anything less than the best you can possibly get. Well worth the time and investment. Cat6 cables and the accessories to have your PC hardwired will cost you barely £40 say.

In terms of sorting WiFi for other devices in the home, if you do a Cat6 run (I'd do 2 runs tbh) to your man cave - also get yourself a 2 piece mesh wifi kit, but you can then hardwire it so your backhaul is directly connected and you lose no bandwidth. This will mean your wifi coverage is hugely improved with an AP at both ends of the house, and your PC is hardwired so can get the full 1Gb from your connection.

Also means in the future if you switch to Openreach FTTP, your home is already Cat6 wired so if OR fit your ONT in the same location where VM came in, it's easy to get your network back online as it was.
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Thanks. There's OpenReach equipment from the previous owners in the house already which is (I believe) the Huawei 4-port modem, and it's right next to the VM incoming so everything is certainly there. In fact, I would be attempting to use the hole the OpenReach equipment uses to get out of the house, and then I only need to drill one hole at the back of the house to get into the office upstairs.

With regards to the cabling logistics in your suggestion, would this look about right:

VM SuperHub4 back in router mode, but with WiFi turned off. Then using two of the 4x1Gb ethernet ports on the VM hub, two Cat6 runs outside the house to the office. One of those will be a hardwire for the gaming PC, the second would be to connect the first node of the mesh. Then I'd have a second mesh node sat just at the bottom of the stairs (roughly centre of the house but through a few walls from the office) to cover off everything there, including getting WiFi right back to the front of the house (ironic as this is where the ingress is :D ) for the Ring doorbell, and cars to do WiFi updates?
 
Sounds about right and almost where I was going with it.

But would the second mesh AP not cover the house being situated where the VM hub is, rather than under the stairs in wireless mode? Whilst the first AP is in the office/bedroom. So effectively you have 2 APs hard wired in 2 corners of the house?

Otherwise the mesh AP under the stairs I presume would be wireless and losing some bandwidth, probably not the end of the world though but I'd rather if it were me, just have 2 APs hardwired if it covered the house still.
 
Sparx said:
Sounds about right and almost where I was going with it.

But would the second mesh AP not cover the house being situated where the VM hub is, rather than under the stairs in wireless mode? Whilst the first AP is in the office/bedroom. So effectively you have 2 APs hard wired in 2 corners of the house?

Otherwise the mesh AP under the stairs I presume would be wireless and losing some bandwidth, probably not the end of the world though but I'd rather if it were me, just have 2 APs hardwired if it covered the house still.
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Ah yea hadn't thought of that :) yea, I use a third port on the hub to run the second mesh node. OK, sound like a plan :D now I just need to find someone with a big drill!

When the time comes to switch to BT/OR, would the mesh nodes be wired into the modem or would it be the same as VM, i.e. use the BT Smart Hub but disable wireless again?
 
Depends on the mesh kit you get, I'm pretty sure most have it where the main node can perform routing as well. In which case if you went OR FTTP later, you could just use the mesh router kit and wire it straight into the ONT modem. So no need to keep BT or whichever ISP's router connected up.

But if you do that you'll either need a mesh kit with 3-4 gigabit ethernet ports, or you'll need to have a separate switch connected too. Otherwise you'll lose the ports to wire up your man cave obviously lol.
 
Personally I would run a cable, however as you are looking at mesh, you are entitled to upto 3 free VM Wi-Fi pods on Gig1, why not use them?
 
Avalon said:
Personally I would run a cable, however as you are looking at mesh, you are entitled to upto 3 free VM Wi-Fi pods on Gig1, why not use them?
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I got one of the free WiFi pod plugs from VM late last year, they seem crap and didn't improve anything at all for us bizarrely. It was almost like they're a placebo effect lol
 
Sparx said:
I got one of the free WiFi pod plugs from VM late last year, they seem crap and didn't improve anything at all for us bizarrely. It was almost like they're a placebo effect lol
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Like any mesh system, it’s the backhaul that’s critical, if that’s wired, it’ll be decent, if it’s wireless, a lot depends on where you site it, if the radio is used for backhaul and clients, and poorly suited, it’ll be useless. The pods work, but you need to deploy them properly.
 
Avalon said:
Personally I would run a cable, however as you are looking at mesh, you are entitled to upto 3 free VM Wi-Fi pods on Gig1, why not use them?
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I didn't know that. As mentioned though, I'm likely to ditch VM in a year so I'd be looking to do this change anyway, not to mention the fact the VM engineer told me to never bother using the Hub4's WiFi system ever :D

I was thinking about the outdoor cable runs - would I actually only need to do one? If I got something like the TP Link Deco X20s which have two Gb ports on the back, I could run one cable up to the office to run that node, and then patch in my PC from that directly? I know I'd lose any bandwidth that WiFi was taking up but we're not particularly heavy users so if I was still seeing 800Mb+ at the PC I'd be very happy.
 
Avalon said:
Like any mesh system, it’s the backhaul that’s critical, if that’s wired, it’ll be decent, if it’s wireless, a lot depends on where you site it, if the radio is used for backhaul and clients, and poorly suited, it’ll be useless. The pods work, but you need to deploy them properly.
Click to expand...

I know hence my previous post on hardwiring a mesh kit to the OP :D

But the marketing gimmick of VM's wifi pods is it's essentially to just plug in a socket and help extend the wifi. I did this on our upstairs almost directly above the VM hub - it did absolutely nothing to help the signal in upstair corners of our home, infact from memory I think it might've decreased the wifi speeds even. Maybe mine was faulty.

Seems daft to then expect a wifi extender plug to be hardwired, defeats the purpose and ease of having an easy plug in extender. Which is why I just did it properly and run Cat6 upstairs and can connect an AP if I desire on the landing ceiling.
 
squerble said:
I was thinking about the outdoor cable runs - would I actually only need to do one? If I got something like the TP Link Deco X20s which have two Gb ports on the back, I could run one cable up to the office to run that node, and then patch in my PC from that directly? I know I'd lose any bandwidth that WiFi was taking up but we're not particularly heavy users so if I was still seeing 800Mb+ at the PC I'd be very happy.
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Yes you could run just one Cat6 if the mesh node has 2 or more ethernet ports (one for the WAN, second for your PC).

But personally for the effort to run one cable, you may as well run 2 for redundancy. Just in case one fails, breaks or is damaged in the future.
 
Thanks for everyone's input!

As a final question, is dual-band/tri-band likely to make any difference if I'm going to be using Ethernet backhaul?
 
On a wifi client you're not going to really notice the difference, especially with a wired backhaul. I wouldn't waste your money if a tri-band kit is a sigificant cost more.
 
Just wanted to update and say thanks again to @Sparx . Ran the two cables today, so now have a wired PC, and a nice little two node TP Link Deco X20 system set up in the house. Getting over 900Mb to my laptop over wifi, even getting over 400 while sat in a room that has several walls or even a floor between the two nodes.
 
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