Mesh wifi

mart1985

mart1985

mart1985

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Joined
27 Sep 2012
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371
I have had issues with our internet speeds ever since we moved into our house (7 years ago now). We recently switched to Sky on their 'superfast' package, with a promised speed of 45mbs and expected of 50-60.

After a few weeks we kept having drop outs and I didn't see anything over 40mbs. We had an Openreach engineer come out who basically said the cables are pants in this area, but full fibre isn't going to be available until 2025.

Short of trying to get others to go in on full fibre or getting something like Starlink, I feel a mesh wifi system is worth investigating. Starlink looks great, but I'm under the impression it doesn't help much with gaming due to the latency?

I currently have some powerline adapters for my gaming pc and work laptop. These work ok given the limitations of the broadband line, but wifi is intermittent upstairs in particular.

I have looked at the TP-Link DEco X20 and the Devolo Magic 2 as a standard option and another powerline option. I would be grateful for any recommendations or suggestions on how to get a more reliable connection.
 
A mesh Wi-Fi won't make any difference to the speed of your actual internet connection so would be unlikely to be worth bothering with.

Do a speed test with a client hard wired to you router. What results do you get? Post that and a test done when using Wi-Fi.

If latency is your big concern then Starlink won't help. The laws of physics get in the way.
 
mart1985 said:
I have had issues with our internet speeds ever since we moved into our house (7 years ago now). We recently switched to Sky on their 'superfast' package, with a promised speed of 45mbs and expected of 50-60.

After a few weeks we kept having drop outs and I didn't see anything over 40mbs. We had an Openreach engineer come out who basically said the cables are pants in this area, but full fibre isn't going to be available until 2025.

Short of trying to get others to go in on full fibre or getting something like Starlink, I feel a mesh wifi system is worth investigating. Starlink looks great, but I'm under the impression it doesn't help much with gaming due to the latency?

I currently have some powerline adapters for my gaming pc and work laptop. These work ok given the limitations of the broadband line, but wifi is intermittent upstairs in particular.

I have looked at the TP-Link DEco X20 and the Devolo Magic 2 as a standard option and another powerline option. I would be grateful for any recommendations or suggestions on how to get a more reliable connection.
Click to expand...

When I had Sky and powerlines I had lots of drop outs and speed reductions leading to me getting the engineers out on a few occasions, they would reset things and it'd be good but drop
again later, the problem was the powerline devices and the interference they generate knocking back my broad band speed. Unplug them and see what the speed and stability is without them for a few weeks, you have to do it over time such that the cabinet can give you the speed back.

Obviously that is probably massively inconvenient so you can try what I did which was moving the powerline device that was in the power sockets next to the phone line and modem to the other side of the house using an ethernet cable, this fixed speed and stability completely, then once my internet was happy and stable the actual power line devices performance became the limitation in that some of the house got full bandwidth but in my office I only got a third, Mesh wifi sorted that particular issue and allowed me to remove powerline entirely.

Up to this point wifi never did the job for me and I had been a powerline user for decades, but mesh wifi solutions are so good now powerline has no benefit unless you are one of those against wifi signals.
 
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You're basically trying to smash two problems into one. The first being the broadband dropping out, and the second being the Wi-Fi being poor upstairs.

For the first problem, if the line is still dropping and slowly losing speed, keep pushing Sky to have a look. I had a similar issue a few weeks back and eventually got a good OR engineer who moved me to a different port on the cabinet. So far that seems to have fixed it and I haven't had a dropout since.

For the second problem, it depends on the house itself, example, is the upstairs on a different circuit to the ground floor? Is the wiring old? Are the powerlines on extensions? A lot of factors can affect sync speeds and reliability. Mesh can help in that case as long as you place the nodes in the right places. From experience latency is pretty low if you have a decent set. Not as low as a proper cable, but if that isn't an option it's an easy solution, and a pack of 3 should cover most houses easily.
 
I purchased an amazon eero pro 6 (3 pack) in january, been great, wifi all over the house and most importantly its been rock solid in that time, I also love the simplicity of them. My virgin media hub 3 is in modem mode.
 
I'm a big fan of the dirt cheap TP Link AC1900 solution. My sky drops out too. I think it's their garbage router though as I had 10 years worry free on a PFSense setup.
 
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