OV9

Finally had it with the crap router supplied with my broadband. Any recommendations/warnings? Don't need anything OTT, just want decent signal.

I've read reviews, but want real world view too. Rev, didn't you get the BT kit?

Buy a few of these

https://www.utilitynetworks.co.uk/open- ... cess-point

They're cheap, licence free and work well. I gave up my farkin expensive Cisco Meraki mesh wifi kit for these last year.

Do they do an AC version?

tim wrote: ↑Tue Jul 17, 2018 11:09 am Buy a few of these

https://www.utilitynetworks.co.uk/open- ... cess-point

They're cheap, licence free and work well. I gave up my farkin expensive Cisco Meraki mesh wifi kit for these last year.

Cheers. Will take a look.

I bought a Google Wifi two pack. Setting up is a piece of cake, things like handing over between nodes is all done seamlessly and without me having to do any fiddling. But they're not particularly cheap and I ended up needing another one (which meant buying another twin pack) for full house coverage. They've been stable and reliable ever since placing them and turning them on.

Overall, highly recommended but definitely try to find a deal if you go for the Google ones. I've read that the speed isn't as good as some others, but even at the furthest points it seems to maintain pretty close to the maximum speed I can get from my FTTP connection (100mbps symmetrical at present - if I stumped up £30 extra a month for 1Gbps then I suspect I'd notice the mesh capping speeds).

Simon wrote: ↑Tue Jul 17, 2018 12:08 pm Do they do an AC version?

Yes you can buy power adaptors separately.

If you're a techie - Ubiquiti Mesh.

If you're not, BT or Google (as Si mentions).

Matty wrote: ↑Tue Jul 17, 2018 1:50 pm If you're a techie - Ubiquiti Mesh.

If you're not, BT or Google (as Si mentions).

I have an Ubiquiti Unifi Pro which covers 3 floors of a 10x10m house from one unit on the middle floor. I was expecting to have to use 2 to cover the whole house and garden but an extra unit isn't needed as i get 40+mbs in the garden.

I'm not a techie and found it straight forward to set-up with their Windows App.

tim wrote: ↑Tue Jul 17, 2018 1:10 pm

Simon wrote: ↑Tue Jul 17, 2018 12:08 pm Do they do an AC version?

Yes you can buy power adaptors separately.

notsureifserious.jpg

No, I mean 802.11 AC. Those are G and N...

BT Whole Home Wifi works well for me - one disc plugged into the router and the others connect to that; three discs are enough to give complete coverage over four floors of brick-walled house and the garden to boot, and setup was a doddle. I think a three-pack was around £180 on some Amazon prime deal a year ago.

Anybody have experience with the Devolo Magic devices? I like the idea of mesh wifi with powerline capability (including for backhaul). Also means I won't need another thing to power/find space for and I will replace my existing powerline adapters.

I'm not too fussed about ultimate speeds. Mostly it is for general browsing of the internet, streaming Netflix/Spotify/iPlayer.

WiFi 6 has just launched (it was planned to be known as 802.11ax in old money), it’s mostly about multi device connection and will get better as time goes by.

WiFi 5 (formally .11ac) is about three times slower, but still far above current internet connection speeds. The difficulty arises when you spread that connection is shared between several devices.

So, either buy (expensive) 6 now, or look around for some 5 devices that should be appearing at sale prices.

IanF wrote: ↑Wed Feb 27, 2019 9:06 pm WiFi 6 has just launched (it was planned to be known as 802.11ax in old money), it’s mostly about multi device connection and will get better as time goes by.

WiFi 5 (formally .11ac) is about three times slower, but still far above current internet connection speeds. The difficulty arises when you spread that connection is shared between several devices.

So, either buy (expensive) 6 now, or look around for some 5 devices that should be appearing at sale prices.

Not too bothered about that. For our needs we don't require the latest and greatest, just a stable connection that means that we can use devices throughout the house and the garden.

Do your connected devices need to be Wifi 6 compatible to benefit from the new standard?

I remember when 802.11n came out, if you had one device which still used 802.11g it limited the speed to that. Since it was such a common issue I imagine this has been considered and overcome... but what's the point in being an early adopter, eh? Pay more to iron out the problems.

Seems what I did by taking various old Wifi routers and turning off the DHCP servers, renaming the wireless SSID to all be the same and setting the same passwords for wifi achieved a mesh network. I have the master virgin box (latest model) downstairs a 1000m/bit cable to the loft and a BT homehub 5 up there, AV500 homeplug out to the garage and a homehub 3 out there too. Seems to work well enough, good use for the kit which would otherwise be binned.

Carl.

Jobbo wrote: ↑Thu Feb 28, 2019 11:15 am Do your connected devices need to be Wifi 6 compatible to benefit from the new standard?

I remember when 802.11n came out, if you had one device which still used 802.11g it limited the speed to that. Since it was such a common issue I imagine this has been considered and overcome... but what's the point in being an early adopter, eh? Pay more to iron out the problems.

Well, yes although it’s all backwards compatible. Any device that isn’t 6 enabled will work at whatever speed it’s capable of, but this won’t limit the speed to other devices.

Jobbo wrote: ↑Tue Jul 17, 2018 1:06 pm I bought a Google Wifi two pack. Setting up is a piece of cake, things like handing over between nodes is all done seamlessly and without me having to do any fiddling. But they're not particularly cheap and I ended up needing another one (which meant buying another twin pack) for full house coverage. They've been stable and reliable ever since placing them and turning them on.

Overall, highly recommended but definitely try to find a deal if you go for the Google ones. I've read that the speed isn't as good as some others, but even at the furthest points it seems to maintain pretty close to the maximum speed I can get from my FTTP connection (100mbps symmetrical at present - if I stumped up £30 extra a month for 1Gbps then I suspect I'd notice the mesh capping speeds).

I have three Google WiFi things over a trip two floor, reasonable sized 3 bed Victorian house.

I've not been impressed.

Not very fast, not a very strong signal etc.

I've got two of them stood on foil sheets now to try and boost the signal (which did improve things), but it's not a big house etc.

After quite some time with the Google Wifi, I'm not going to recommend them wholeheartedly. They're stable, they do provide coverage throughout the house and they're very easy to set up and use, but they're not perfect.

There are places within our house where wifi is much slower, and after trying various locations for the devices (we have four) it can actually get worse as you move them closer to the problem areas. So after fiddling around quite a bit I reverted to where they were when I first installed them and have left them. For multi-gigabyte downloads I make sure I'm nearer the primary Google Wifi unit.

The weird thing is, ours are pretty much strung out in a line rather than laid out in a ring, and that gets the best speeds at the far end of the house. I don't understand that; surely they ought to be better when they're laid out in a way where they can all communicate with each other?

Have you considered just buying a better router? I have one of these and it’s excellent in my 5 year old 2 bed, 2 story house...

https://amzn.to/2X9h8Gu

Other benefits include, looking like an Imperial Shuttle coming in to land

I did consider that, but if there were any issues with the broadband, the first thing they'd ask for is the supplied router to be connected. And your choice is significantly more than the mesh kit I have bought.