What mesh wifi?

cjed

Yes, no problems that I'm aware of.

Toon Army

Thanks, will purchase three units in the " Boxing Day " sales. Amazon seems to be the best price at the moment.

sidewayslee

Another thumbs up here for BT Whole Home, easy to install, seamless switching and the parental controls are a doddle.

No issues with firmware updates either.

Mine have been in just over a year.

Toon Army

Amazon now down to £149 for three discs! Wonder if they are releasing a new model?

Bl4ckGryph0n

I went for the Tenda MW3, 5 nodes for £126....It has been rock solid and very good...

Toon Army

Ordered the BT Whole Home 3 disc set and will endeavour to run cat 6 cables from the router to two of the discs.

Bl4ckGryph0n

In that case what is the point of going for a mesh network? You may as well get cheap access points.

Toon Army

I have a Develo dLan powerline system and it does not cope well with our mains wiring. We live in a large 1920s built house that has been extended a number of occasions over three floors,  resulting in various MCBs for those extensions.

Bl4ckGryph0n

Which is fair enough but that has nothing to do with it Why get a mesh system when you actually aren't going to use it as a mesh but a hub and spoke instead. To me that doesn't make any sense at all, as any wireless access point can do that for much less money.

mickevh

I completely understand the sentiment of your comment and agree that wired backhauls is always going to be superior to ("mesh") Wi-Fi links.

However, as I understand it, some of the so called "mesh" and "whole home" type systems being punted at the SOHO marketplace presently are introducing "other" things into the SOHO realm that used to be the preserve of enterprise systems such as some collaboration between the AP's in the fleet to try an "steer" clients to the "best" (however one might define that) AP, improve roaming handoff performance and avail a single management platform (e.g. a phone app.) etc.

Thusly, even when "doing it properly" with wired backhaul links, these newer "mesh" and "whole home" system may still offer some advantage to the SOHO users over a heterogeneous network of stand alone AP's, even when they aren't using radio for the backhaul links. As ever with Wi-Fi, it's way more complicated that many realise and the buyer should check the spec of their prospective purchase carefully to see what it can and cannot do.

I fear that as it's gotten into the public zeitgeist, the term "mesh" is getting overloaded and implied to mean many different things to different people (in the same way "Wi-Fi" means "Internet" to most people when of course Wi-Fi per se actually has nothing to do with "Internet;" "Hoover" means "vacuum cleaner;" etc.)