Router/Mesh system for large property

BennyC

BennyC

BennyC

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25 Sep 2006
Posts
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I've just moved to a rather large property, solid brick, 9ft ceilings, 3 floors etc.

The previous owner has left their Virgin Media issue router and 3-pin WiFi Pod but a few of my external wi-fi Ring cam's have poor signal and I would also like good coverage in the garden.

I'm more than happy to invest in a good router or mesh system but know relatively little and have never really got in to networking but am not a total idiot.

Thanks!
 
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Any suggestions? Light reviews and research have lead me to the ASUS AX6600 however I've read here that security is not necessarily a strong point?

I have very basic needs, secure, consistent and reliable coverage.
 
I'd be interested in any recommendations too. My home isn't huge but its a weird town house spread across 4 floors (1 floor is just stairs and a bedroom, top floor is a 2 room loft conversion) so at present I use a Netgear Orbi system (from 2018) with 1 router and 2 satellites. Obviously I could get a newer equivalent but they are super expensive.

(broadband connection is 1000Mbps fibre and I can't have a wired backhaul)
 
Speaking from direct personal experience (7ft doors, early 1911's finest double course solid brick work on every wall, 12ft ceilings etc.) i'm going to tell you the simple answer: Run cable to each room. It literally makes life 10x easier to place AP's or mesh nodes on the end of and is transformative. The unfortunate truth is wifi is not built for houses like this, the normal rule of one solid wall max doesn't apply when they are a foot thick, the good news is over the decades the various modernisations done such as rewiring, central heating and the like will mean floor board routes are easily accessed and followed from room to room and this is often a lot easier than you'd think. It's also easy to come out of air bricks, run up/behind guttering and into the loft etc. and if it's anything like the one I had to deal with, you've got several feet under the ground floor to make running cables a doddle.

At the time I did this, mesh wasn't really much good, now we have wired and dedicated radio backhauls, so if I was doing this now, i'd just do a run to each room and a Deco node on the end of each which provides wifi and ethernet backhaul. With a view to 2.5/10Gb 5e or 6 will do 10Gb over residential distances.
 
With regard to the router I'd say that Asus and Draytek have the best reputation. Router choice is frequently discussed here so it might be worth a search of previous posts.

Other brands I'm aware of are:

GL.iNet
Linksys
Meraki Go
Netgear
TP-Link
 
radderfire said:
With regard to the router I'd say that Asus and Draytek have the best reputation. Router choice is frequently discussed here so it might be worth a search of previous posts.

Other brands I'm aware of are:

GL.iNet
Linksys
Meraki Go
Netgear
TP-Link
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Look, this is getting silly, this will be the third time i've called you out for low quality ChatGPT answers. Nobody with any reasonable level of knowledge of networking and the brands you mention is going to recommend ASUS based on it's woeful history of faking certification results, not patching security holes for years, abandoning customers with years of false promises (the MediaTek modem chipset fiasco on this very sub forum), and more recent flaming rubbish bin of security issues. They certainly aren't pairing that recommendation up with Draytek who make boringly dependable hardware and support it for stupidly long periods of time. If you don't know the answer, stop asking ChatGPT and regurgitating it's output here, it's just embarrassing when it's clearly wrong/dumb.
 
Actually I didn't use ChatGPT, I answered it from my own knowledge, but thanks for your opinion on Asus, I'll bear it in mind. Now you mention it I do recall support issues. I'm just trying to help the guy out and as he said he didn't know anything about networking then I think a list of router brands is a good start. My list is not what ChatGPT would give you.
 
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Avalon said:
Speaking from direct personal experience (7ft doors, early 1911's finest double course solid brick work on every wall, 12ft ceilings etc.) i'm going to tell you the simple answer: Run cable to each room. It literally makes life 10x easier to place AP's or mesh nodes on the end of and is transformative. The unfortunate truth is wifi is not built for houses like this, the normal rule of one solid wall max doesn't apply when they are a foot thick, the good news is over the decades the various modernisations done such as rewiring, central heating and the like will mean floor board routes are easily accessed and followed from room to room and this is often a lot easier than you'd think. It's also easy to come out of air bricks, run up/behind guttering and into the loft etc. and if it's anything like the one I had to deal with, you've got several feet under the ground floor to make running cables a doddle.

At the time I did this, mesh wasn't really much good, now we have wired and dedicated radio backhauls, so if I was doing this now, i'd just do a run to each room and a Deco node on the end of each which provides wifi and ethernet backhaul. With a view to 2.5/10Gb 5e or 6 will do 10Gb over residential distances.
Click to expand...

Thanks, I've no issue running cables, I've crimped ends for CCTV/PoE before.

I'm getting around 3-400mb on wi-fi upstairs one of the rooms furthest from the router, I just need something with a stronger signal than the Virgin Media Hub 5, to reach cameras outside sufficiently well.
 
BennyC said:
Thanks, I've no issue running cables, I've crimped ends for CCTV/PoE before.

I'm getting around 3-400mb on wi-fi upstairs one of the rooms furthest from the router, I just need something with a stronger signal than the Virgin Media Hub 5, to reach cameras outside sufficiently well.
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If you can run cables somewhere nearby, I really rate the Deco's for the money (a pair of x20's is often £99 on 'offer' and the X50's not much more with the extra switch ports). I had them doing 800mbit floor to floor between nodes when I had some building work done that removed my floor interlinks. The great thing about Deco is it's well proven and supported with compatibility over multiple generations, and it means whoever your ISpISP and whatever router they give you, you can move the system over, the down side is limited management in terms of multiple SSID's (main and guest only) and band/channel selection (auto), but things like blocking the kids devices are easy from the app for example.
 
Cable / mesh / powerline/ wifi. Mix of all 4. Sometimes a mix is required to get something that works for all scenarios.

I purchased the linksys ax5400 3 pack (£100) thinking it would solve my signal issues but i still get random signal drops in the upstairs office (signal dead zone) going from 600 down to 30 on occasion. Average seems to be 300 in the office at the moment. Full signal at the router is 950. no easy way to hardwire a cable but will monitor and see if the mesh signal stabilises or i can identify what causes it to drop off so significantly.

Media wall, behind the telly is also a signal dead zone even though the mesh device sits inside the room, so have put a powerline in behind the tv hardwired to a switch and this gives me better performance for my shield media streaming.

Rest of the house is ok for signal from the mesh although the ping is slightly higher than id like for the bedroom ps5 (22ms compared to 5ms at router) but i would need to cable ethernet to get that significantly down.
 
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ive used the tp link deco system a bit and its quite good
the only thing that i can complain about is that the app doesnt update fast enough so if theres a problem it can be a little while before it gives you useful information
the units are also pretty cheap
 
radderfire said:
With regard to the router I'd say that Asus and Draytek have the best reputation. Router choice is frequently discussed here so it might be worth a search of previous posts.

Other brands I'm aware of are:

GL.iNet
Linksys
Meraki Go
Netgear
TP-Link
Click to expand...
Nobody says "Asus has the best reputation", and who has the best reputation wasn't what was asked.
Even I as a draytek user at both home and work, and a relative draytek fan, rarely recommend Draytek for home use.


radderfire said:
Actually I didn't use ChatGPT, I answered it from my own knowledge, but thanks for your opinion on Asus, I'll bear it in mind. Now you mention it I do recall support issues. I'm just trying to help the guy out and as he said he didn't know anything about networking then I think a list of router brands is a good start. My list is not what ChatGPT would give you.
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It reads like chatgpt, whether you've just edited it or not.
A list of router brands isn't helpful in any way.

If we see any more "AI style" posts then action will be taken.
 
Maybe a bit late to the party here but I’d go down the route of getting it wired and litter the place with APs.

you’d need to wire the mesh anyway and it would be more cost effective to go down the AP route.

I’ve got Cisco stuff now, I ended up just buying it all second hand from eBay and saved a fortune but it’s the berries and rock solid.
 
BennyC said:
I'm getting around 3-400mb on wi-fi upstairs one of the rooms furthest from the router, I just need something with a stronger signal than the Virgin Media Hub 5, to reach cameras outside sufficiently well.
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How far away are the cameras?

You could fit an outdoor Wireless Access Point, connected by PoE cable.
 
Thanks for all the suggestions and replies.

For the time being 2 quite old powerline style boosters have improved the quality sufficiently enough for the camera's which buys me some more time to research, I'll revisit this to update :)

Plans to replace the hallway floor in the not too distant future give an opportunity to run cable to the front rooms.
 
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