I'm asking out of curiosity and in the hope of gaining insights for future improvements.
I currently use an Asus AX88U Wi‑Fi 6 router that covers my 200 m² home well. I might move to a larger house next year, and I'm considering adding another Asus router (not necessarily the same model) to create a mesh system.
Happy to hear comments from owners of Netgear/Ubiquiti/TP-link or other brands. What do you like and don't like about the current system?
I'm not familiar with Ubiquiti products. Do you have to have a PoE switch or a PoE injector? And the second AP will need to be wired, so it's not really a mesh system?
unifi use poe which is great.
NETGEAR’s Orbi Mesh WiFi Systems feature a dedicated WiFi band for the network backhaul, which is what you are wanting
the word mesh is used so widely i used physical Ethernet cable for backhaul.
Thanks I see. As long as the house has network outlets in different rooms, a physical connection is actually fine.
I run Ubiquiti products at my place and would definitely recommend them.
I started off with a the "Dream Router (UDR)" and have since expanded to a UDM-SE (it's a slippery slope once you're in the ecosystem haha). My house is not as big as yours at 180 m² but it is long. I have 3 access points and the internet is flawless everywhere.
They have just announced a Wifi 7 model of the UDR that will likely be in NZ in a few weeks/months: https://store.ui.com/us/en/products/udr7
It seems to be getting decent reviews online too. I'd be keeping an eye out for that if I were in your position. Especially if you want the ability to expand in the future
What aps do you use? U6 LR?
I have a U6 Lite for the bedrooms. U6 Pro for the centre of the house and a U6-IW for the lounge which is mostly used as a switch for the TV, Xbox etc. From what I have read, the U6 LR is not very good and the Pro is the one to go for. But your milage may vary.
Just googled. UDR $580 + U6 Lite $260 + U6 Pro $370 + U6-IW $440 = $1650
That seems to be a lot of money unless you buy second hand?
@xsolider: UDR creates it's own wifi signal. So all the rest are additional and potentially not required.
With the UDR7 coming, it may be able to cover your entire house, or it may only be able to do a portion of it and you'll need an additional access point.
The unifi stuff does also support mesh networking, but I would recommend hardwiring everything if you can.
Definitely try the design tool if you have a floor plan. You'll see what you need: https://design.ui.com/
Annoyingly it hasn't been updated with the UDR7 yet. I also wouldn't recommend the original UDR as it is limited to 700Mbps internet speeds
@ashbut22: I understand that the rest are all add-on APs. But I'm just a bit surprised that you have added 3 additional APs on top of the main router. Did the design tool suggest that way?
@xsolider: I started off with a UDR in the centre of the house, it was located in a cupboard and the signal wasn't great in the far bedrooms.
So I got a U6 Lite for the bedrooms and that solved that issue. Then I found that we were regularly hitting the 700Mbps speed limit and it was causing us to get disconnects for some reason, so I upgraded to the UDM-SE and a U6 Pro for the middle of the house where the old UDR was.
The U6 IW in the lounge was because I was looking at hardwiring the TV/Xbox anyway and it made sense to add wifi there too. It simply replaced the ethernet port on the wall with a switch and AP.
Good thing about Unifi or other solutions like that, is that you can upgrade as needed, but more importantly upgrade older devices one at a time as needed.
If you've got it. Upload your floor plan to their design tool. That way it will show you the expected coverage. https://design.ui.com/
Slippery slope is a very good description of Unifi gear, started with a US-16-150W I got for cheap because the power supply was dead, added a couple of AC-LRs. That was a perfectly acceptable network with the controller running in a docker container. Since upgraded to UDM-Pro, USW-Aggregation for 10g, USW Flex, U6-Pro, U6-Lite, U6-Mesh, plus also 3x G3-Flexes and a G4 and G5 Bullet.
Pros: other than ISP issues, the Unifi gear has been rock solid, VPN remote access into home network.
Cons: very $$ for people who can't say no to new hardware.
TP Link X50's all wired backhaul across a fairly spread out home, connected back to a Linksys WRT router for simplicity (and control etc).
I have no complaints, works well for wired and wireless, and I cant remember the last time they dropped out….
Pair if Asus XT8 with a couple of BD4s thrown in,
Have the XT8 using their dedicated third band for wireless backhaul, and one of the BD4 on ethernet backhaul
Once we renovate, then plan would be to drop more ethernet into the walls and run ethernet backhauls where possible
Works well for me, 500-700 down in most of the house
Running five Deco M9 Plusses across two two-story dwellings and have no issues. Have run Ubiquiti in the past and would happily do so again but I scored a deal on these when we moved that made them a lot more cost effective than any other option.
Ok hijacking this forum but I have orbi modern and a satellite that was provided by 2degrees.
The features on this one is so limited that I can't have any wifi controls whatsoever.
I am not that technical and don't have much to invest. But if I wanted to have say WiFi turn off schedules and some advanced parental controls like site block list or app block list. What cheapest router should I go for?
House is on 2 levels and around 150sqmt floor.
Thanks
AFAIK you can do parent control on orbi devices.
Nah. Just logged in via browser and couldn't find anything. It did have a schedule section but only for sites list.
Even the site list asks to enter each site name separately. Not helpful sorry
You need to use the app instead. Parent Controls is on the main page.
https://www.netgear.com/ae/home/services/orbi-app/
Go for tp-link. Most of the those features on orbi are behind subscription. Also, the app has limited functionality. If you login your router via browser you will have some more control. Those were one of the main reason I dumped orbi and got Asus few years back and wish had done that sooner. I believe Asus has got most features out there with excellent mobile app in consumer routers.
Yea. I guess Netgear is trying hard for subscriptions. In my previous smaller house i had the voda 4g connection and the wifi was shit. So bought a cheap $20 Chinese AP off marketplace to get better wifi which it did.
At least that AP had so many features. Like wifi on/off scheduling and sites block group: gambling, pornography etc
I will try Asus as you mentioned.
I'm runnkng a pair of asus routers and they just get the job done with the aimesh. I jave so lottle tk say about it thst its a good thing.
Only this week hit an issue but I think I've overloaded it with over 40 devices. Im weighing up putting in a pfsense router and converting the pair of asus units to be access points in mesh mode.
What models?
I have a pair of RT-AX56U. Theh arent high end units but have been fine for my usage until this week wjen i put one too many devices om.
Wifi wise i have wired everything i can around the house and put all iot devkces on the 2.4ghz band so the 5ghz band is reserved purely for interactive devices like phones tablets and laptops whicj keep it snappy.
Unifi here, but run older hardware. USG gateway and switch etc..
I run grandstream networks gear, bit more cheapies friendly than unifi system. The gwn7062 router in garage with its own wifi , includes a controller built in. That connects to a poe switch (tp-link, less than $100) which I connect another access point to at other end of house on other floor (gwn7660LR). I get seamless roaming through the two floors with all the devices and setup was easy. You can use the nonLR version which is even cheaper if you can ceiling mount but with the layout of this house, I didn't have convenient access to cable runs for that so used the LR version which is just sitting on a shelf.
Nice, I use their AP for my small place. I just run the onboard controller for it. Run unifi at work, but it's too much for my single AP house and obviously costs more.
I have a Unifi setup at home except its not a full setup as they are so slow to get their gear here so I have many non unifi switches to get me 10 gig around the place.
I doubt that you are getting full coverage from a single AP in a house that large from a single device that is working reliably. I can only get thru 2 walls before the 5GHz networks are starting to be quite stuttery, so there are 4 APs thru the house, 1 in the garage, 1 in the loft above the garage and a couple of outdoor ones for wifi when mowing the lawn and so the car has good connectivity.
I have stuck with 802.11ac as the speeds are sufficient for a small number of devices, and with multiple APs available things are always getting near the max speed which seems to be about 400 down 300 up on most things.
Sorry I got the size of the house wrong. Just checked on Homes and it says the floor area is 203m2. A single device can cover the whole area well.
I'm surprised that quite a few people in this thread use 3 or more APs in their house.
Fyi: Only the floor area is not enough to determine the coverage. You need to consider the location of router/ap, how many levels in the house, is the router/ap in open area or behind something hidden(like closet) etc. Also, interference & cross-over channel overlaps.
Our Asus router is sitting in the garage, by the fibre ont box. It's a single storey house, that's probably why we don't need multiple network devices.
@xsolider: I have asus gt-ax6000 sitting almost centrally on the ground level (on shelf, high above the door) and it covers the whole house (2 level) inside and outside upto the road along with driveway pretty nicely. I think my house is around 195m2.
@ace310: That's nice! It seems to me that Asus users spend a lot less than Ubiquiti users as we need fewer APs. Do you use Asus's own firmware or Merlin?
You don't want nodes too close otherwise they start interfering with each other. We have 170m² and i use two but they are at the extremes of the house to avoid clashing. We have consistent full bars on 5ghz this way including in the garden but theu afe just faf enough apart to dk the hand off seamlessly. One at each end of the house wouldn't cut it and one central one would probably suffice but wouldnt reach out to the back of the garden so two seemed the sweet spot.
My parents' house is pretty big and I used to be pretty techy and spend ages researching this stuff, but lately I just don't have time anymore and don't wanna deal with the overhead and the management. I ended up just buying a TPLink Deco X55 for them and configured it briefly. It maintained max down/up speeds and connection throughout the house was great. Has been really stable now for over a year.
This is what a lot of techy people miss, you may love tinkering and getting every last bit of speed you can, but most people don't. Your non tech enthusiast just wants working WiFi that's reliable at a speed that is good enough for most tasks, and you don't need ubiquity level performance for that.
If friends ask I always suggest simple off the shelf system at about the right size for their home, then also suggest cabling what they can easily like the tv sat next to the router to inprove reliability and reduce traffic.
Old Asus RT-AC68U, rock solid stable. It's only wifi 5, so bottlenecks out 1G internet connection, but everything I really care about is hardwired. House is small enough that a single router gives OK coverage (as long as you stay out of one corner of the lounge when on 5.4 GHZ)
I'm going to Skip over WiFi-6, and go straight to wifi 7 & a multigig Likely a ceiling mounted POE type solution.
Was going to go Unifi. Their cloud Gateway Max looked perfect untill I found the IDS/IPS throughput is only 1.5 Gbps (I would like upgrade to a 2g internet plan), and the U7 Pro &
U7 Pro Max, looked good untill one read the reviews… The launch of the cloud gateway fiber fixes the first issue, and hopefully unifi fix the second issue with time. Their Flex 2.5g switches look great two. Plus 2.5G adaptors are fairly reasonable priced for my NAS and three computers.
I also looked at TP-link. Their Wifi 7 access points are better reviewed, but overall the eco system doesn't seem as nice as Unifi. Also their gear is 10G ethernet. While I love that, it really does push the spend (and bulk with regards to adaptors) up.
In the end I did nothing. But my new NAS easily saturated 1G links, so an upgrade is on the cards for some time this year.
They have just announced some new ones that have better thruput on the cheap gear, but as usual it will be forever before they are available here. Still waiting on switches from months ago to show up so I can get my vlans thru the 10 gig link to the shed/
Did you consider Grandstream? From everything I can find they seem to be a decent alternative to Ubiquiti and they have some (relatively) reasonably priced POE switches with 10G uplinks so may be a decent option. Im considering GWN7665 + GWN7822P and rolling my own router or mikrotik
When I owned my house (thanks separation lol) I had a mix of 'borrowed' IT equipment.
Miktrotik router with two old Asus routers in AP mode, had a 1gb switch for each room.
Had a garage server whcih did pihole, my fileshare and also a jellyfin server.
The networkign hardware is probably less than $400 all up but it worked brilliantly
What's the best place to buy Ubiquiti products? Interested in Udr7, might be a mid-year purchase. I can see pbtech has it, but no stock. Don't NZ as the listed country on UI website.
Ubiquiti for me, house is about 150m2. Currently on Unifi Network, Protect, Access and getting Talk soon
I have a tplink x80 5g, its good get 100MBs speed on wifi but it does overheat and drop out daily. Being a consumer device it is limited.
If i had the choice i would go back to unifi and run the manager on my server since it is more stable.