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Best Wifi Mesh Network Kits
- woogiewonka 10y agoDoes Wirecutter ever feature a non affiliate product? If not, they are not to be trusted.
- LeoPanthera 10y agoIt's tempting to be cynical about everything on the internet, I know, but I can vouch for Wirecutter's recommendations in 90-95% of cases. They pick decently qualified people for each review and generally go into a lot of detail so it would be difficult for them to recommend something that isn't genuinely good.
- woogiewonka 10y agoRight, as long as they can profit off it. How is that not biased?
- LeoPanthera 10y agoYes, they make money from affiliate links, but they also provide accurate reviews, so why should you care? Do you honestly think it's only possible to write an accurate review if you're not being paid? It's not like they're being paid by the makers of the products, so there's no reason for them to be biased.
- CaptSpify 10y agoNo I dont think it's impossible, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't be skeptical. The Incentives to be dishonest are pretty obvious
- madeofpalk 10y agoSkeptical doesn't mean distrust though. Is there any evidence to suggest Wirecutter has refused to rate an item due to lack of affiliate links?
- wtallis 10y ago> Is there any evidence to suggest Wirecutter has refused to rate an item due to lack of affiliate links? If a product isn't on Amazon where affiliate links can point at it, then is it even mainstream enough for The Wirecutter's intended audience?
- madeofpalk 10y agoYes, this. With programs like skimlinks providing affiliate links for pretty much every single retailer, I'm not even sure how they would review a product that they don't get a kickback from.
- CaptSpify 10y agoI guess I'm just generically distrustful of reviews in general. Companies can give bad reviews just like normal users give terrible reviews. I don't think I've ever seen a review system that you didn't have to take with a big grain of salt.
- sgarman 10y agoI'm not sure how you would create something like the wirecutter with out making money somewhere so I'm all ears for ideas on that. With that in mind I like the affiliate link model because arguably they can choose any product (in their case the 'best' one) instead of cutting deals with the companies directly (i.e. introducing competition in who pays the most).
- Nimsical 10y agoThey don't always recommend products they make money off of. Plenty of their products (especially in the Sweethome version) are recommendations they won't make money off of. They're probably the least biased reviewers out there at the moment and take it very seriously.
- toast0 10y agoI see this as win-win-win. For wirecutter, they make money. For the manufacturer and retailer, they make sales. For me, I can get a short list of probably good products in crowded fields to make a decision and price compare, from a site that doesn't take days to load because of tons of ads. Maybe I wont get the best USB power adapter for my car, but I'll be able to choose from a small menu of them, and will probably get something good. And I can skip reading through hundreds of amazon reviews, many of which are totally irrelevant.
- teeray 10y agoHow do you expect them to pay their staff to provide you the review? Affiliate links are far less annoying than ads that many would block anyway.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- jcheng 10y agoThis one has some recommendations that don't appear to be affiliate links: http://thewirecutter.com/reviews/great-boozy-holiday-gifts/ http://thewirecutter.com/reviews/great-boozy-holiday-gifts/
- interurban 10y agoI think the affiliate model is far better than having ads everywhere on the site. The incentives are far clearer this way. By consistently making good recommendations, they will build a loyal audience, driving further affiliate sales. Their product is their reputation for good reviews. Destroying that is clearly against their interests.
- wheelerwj 10y ago> By consistently making good recommendations, they will build a loyal audience, driving further affiliate sales. I mean, that's exactly how bias works. In fact, this is exactly what amazon is cracking down on right now, incentivized reviews. If your revenue model is based on ads, you grow revenue by growing readership which is grown by writing quality content. However if you're revenue model is based on affiliate income, you increase revenue by selling more stuff.
- Implicated 10y ago> In fact, this is exactly what amazon is cracking down on right now, incentivized reviews. Well... not exactly... They're cracking down on incentivized reviews on amazon.com product pages. Those onsite reviews being a far stretch away from offsite recommendation blog posts that feature affiliate links, which aren't included in any of their product rating/review metrics.
- Spooky23 10y agoThere's a practical and ethical difference between implicit bias and pay for review. The review for a particular product isn't an example of pay for play because the Wirecutter gets paid for anything they review that is sold on Amazon. The bias is the push towards Amazon vs Newegg or Walmart and assessments if price based on ephemeral Amazon pricing vs MSRP. The Amazon crackdown as I understand is about corrupt vendors incentivizing good reviews for shit product.
- Spooky23 10y agoNot necessarily. Implicit bias is always a risk for these kinds of review sites. For example, if vendors know that the site is reviewing their products, they can provide support or a higher level of service to the review and influence the rating. Magazines like Consumer Reports go to great lengths to bake bias out of reviews, and avoid this sort of risk. But their process has its own problems, as it requires that the reviewers really deeply understand the product, or biases ratings towards customer satisfaction. My own car (my trusty Honda Pilot with 300k miles) is an example. It featured a poorly handled transmission defect and recall, yet CR scored a very high expected reliability rating, due to historical owner satisfaction. Caveat emptor applies as always but I agree with you the Wirecutter is a generally good review site.
- maxerickson 10y agoThey are up front about the affiliate links. They've earned a great reputation in spite of them. One strategy would be to discount them somehow. If they give something a great review, don't trust it entirely, but remember it if you also see 5 other good reviews.
- frogpelt 10y agoBy all means, find a review site you can trust and then share it.
- LeoPanthera 10y agoI'm surprised there's no system that features integrated Homeplug[1], so base stations pass data to each other over your power lines. This seems like an obvious solution. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HomePlug https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HomePlug
- ianlevesque 10y agoTP-Link offers exactly that.
- dangoor 10y agoI've gathered from previous discussions of these devices that homeplug performance is not always good. I've never tested it though.
- kfriede 10y agoI use powerline adapters (like homeplug for ethernet) and would say I get about 99.9% uptime. I think I bought either TPLink or Trendnet.
- wtallis 10y agoUptime is a pretty low bar to clear, especially when comparing against ethernet. How consistent is the throughput and how bad is the latency under load?
- garagehaver 10y agoSo, I got a couple TP-Link devices a few months ago to try to extend internet to my garage (very old construction, separate building on the property) as wifi was having a tough time reaching there and I didn't want to mess with replacing the whole rest of the network and running some sort of mesh setup. I currently am using a cheap docsis 3 modem (I believe it's a netgear), and an apple airport extreme for the main network, which is extended to the garage through a couple TP Link powerline networking adapters. I haven't benchmarked the specific powerline performance, but I do know that if I hit up fast.com on my house wifi from my laptop, I get about 100-120 Mbps depending on the day and network conditions. (there's a lot of weird stuff with diff devices and diff routers that I'm eliding here but the Airport Extreme performs very well in my house compared to everything else I've tried) in the garage, on ethernet to the TP Link powerline adapters, i get about 20 Mbps most of the time. It is pretty reliable, but it's a huge performance hit. Granted, I am using them in an extremely adverse arrangement: old wiring, running through lots of intervening hardware, through the ground, to my garage. I'm actually happy with them, for my purposes, but they're really not fast.
- exhilaration 10y agoIs there a DIY solution that can do this? With all features in DD-WRT or OpenWRT, I would have thought the community would have already solved this problem for cheap.
- LeoPanthera 10y agoThe "DIY" solution is mentioned in the article. Buy a bunch of standard WAPs (the Ubiquiti UniFi range is popular) and wire them together with ethernet.
- jforman 10y agoThe Ubiquiti APs (e.g., the AC-PRO) can uplink to each other wirelessly, but only through one hop.
- brians 10y agoAlso, you're giving up half your antenna-seconds for that. I tried it and was not happy—the hardwired performance is generally great, though.
- btgeekboy 10y agoIf you 1) don't have ethernet throughout the house, 2) don't have satellite internet, and 3) can spend a little more, I recommend a pair or more of MoCA adapters as backhaul for the APs. You'll likely get better performance than mesh networking.
- colechristensen 10y agoDepends on how cheap you want to be. Use ethernet and disable all but one of the dhcp servers plugging the leaves LAN port to LAN port. Or just buy repeaters. I tend to have had bad experiences with cheap wifi routers with or without third party firmware. DD-WRT/tomato/others do have mesh features but it depends on the radio chipset and other things. You can just buy a 802.11ac repeater for $40.
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- WhitneyLand 10y agoWireless routers can't really do gigabit speeds? That doesn't sound right. Also he says a separate high bandwidth signal coordinates the units, would that limit range? Why not a lower bandwidth signal?
- windowsworkstoo 10y ago802.11ac wave 1 is 1.3Gbps theoretical max, Wave 2 is 2.3Gbps or so theoretical max. But that's half duplex. And it's shared amongst every station on the AP, so it'd be rare to see consistent gig speeds for a station anywhere other than a lab or perfect test setup.
- mtgx 10y agoI don't think we'll see consistent 1Gbps+ speeds for Wi-Fi until the 802.11ax standard arrives, which is probably 2018-2019. This is a good post about it: http://www.extremetech.com/computing/184685-what-is-802-11ax-wifi-and-do-you-really-need-a-10gbps-connection-to-your-laptop http://www.extremetech.com/computing/184685-what-is-802-11ax...
- honkhonkpants 10y agoGeez, complain much? It's a miracle it works at all.
- imtringued 10y agoIt doesn't. At least not for me.
- nodesocket 10y agoNo mention or review of Google WiFi [1]? Anybody try it? https://store.google.com/product/google_wifi https://store.google.com/product/google_wifi
- itsdrewmiller 10y agoThey do mention it - they explained they didn't test it because it isn't released.
- codinghorror 10y agoNot quite out yet, Amazon says Dec 9th?
- nodesocket 10y agoDo we know if it supports 802.11ac?
- pash 10y agoYes, it's 802.11a/b/g/n/ac. The -ac is "Wave 2," the newer version of the spec that supports wider channels and about twice the bandwidth of early -ac gear at near range.
- mtgx 10y agoGoogle Wi-Fi seems to be using 802.11s "mesh networking" protocol, but I think that's still mainly targeted at in-home/in-building mesh networking. The mesh networking era we'll all expecting could be enabled by the upcoming 802.11ah, which works in the 900Mhz spectrum, and should offer higher ranges. Although I think the target is only 2x of 2.4Ghz Wi-Fi N right now, which seems a little disappointing to me. I was expecting something along of 1KM range (I don't think Wi-Fi N actually reaches 500m in the real world). It may be because the Wi-Fi Alliance is trying to make this an "IoT"-enabling technology as well, rather than allow us to connect to each other's smartphones and notebooks at good speeds and longer ranges. Anandtech says there's quite a big push for 802.11ah from Wi-Fi silicon vendors. http://www.anandtech.com/show/9915/wifi-halow-longrange-lowpower-wifi-for-internetofthings-devices http://www.anandtech.com/show/9915/wifi-halow-longrange-lowp... http://www.anandtech.com/show/8253/thread-group-moots-new-ip-wireless-networking-protocol-for-iot http://www.anandtech.com/show/8253/thread-group-moots-new-ip...
- electic 10y agoWhat about http://plumewifi.com http://plumewifi.com. Anyone have this?
- itsdrewmiller 10y ago"For our first round of testing mesh networking kits, our sole criterion was simple: Does it exist? In the future we may need to rule out mesh networking kits by speed, specs, or price, but for this go-round we tested all of the consumer mesh networking kits that were available at the time (not announced, not in crowdfunding, not preproduction). That group included the Eero, Luma, and Netgear Orbi offerings, as well as both the HD and standard versions of the AmpliFi kit. Google Wi-Fi, Amped Ally, and Plume will have to wait for next time."
- Terretta 10y agoNote that out of the box, Airport does two step wireless network extension: wired-to-wireless base and wireless-to-wireless extenders / relays. You can have multiple wired-to-wired and wired-to-wireless bases on the same network each with its own wireless-to-wireless extenders or relays. This has worked and been solid (no reboots needed) for years.
- vxxzy 10y agoI'd recommend Ubiquiti's UniFi. I installed three total units (one as base, two satellites). The setup spans 15,000sqft across two stories and split building (connected by breezeway). We get full speed on every corner and crevice. It has a great management interface. The cost was only 199. Well worth it.
- nodesocket 10y agoWhat models did you deploy? UniFi UAP-AC-PRO? Don't you also need to buy a power over ethernet switch to use UniFi?
- dawnerd 10y agoThe single units come with a POE injector.
- hedora 10y agoI just bought one UAP-AC-PRO. The one pack comes with a PoE injector. The five pack does not. I highly recommend it after a week of use. Also, the linked article is wrong. The iphone app is more than adequate for simple home setups (no crazy java pc installation required while you're up on a ladder / in the attic installing it). It wouldn't surprise me if they have a comparable android app. Didn't check. Also Ubiquiti are launching a new mesh networking product this month.
- zippergz 10y agoI use the UAP-AC-PROs in my house (and also an Edgerouter Lite at the border). Great stuff, especially for the price.
- manyxcxi 10y agoI have the UAP-AC-PRO and an Edge Router Lite and couldn't be happier. I tried way more expensive consumer routers (Nighthawk), using a pair of TP-Link Archer C7s (with one in AP mode), extenders, freaking everything. They all had problems that were incredibly painful. The AC-PRO covers my entire house (2 story, 2500+ sqft new construction) and garage with no latency issues or dead spots. There's no handoff issues like having multiple APs/extenders, there's a faster throughput than I was getting with the Nighthawk, and the PoE made it a breeze to install centrally in the house. I'm only upset that I waited so long to just give up on the purely 'consumer grade' crap.
- known 10y agohttp://www.open-mesh.com/products.html/ http://www.open-mesh.com/products.html/ are also good
- 24gttghh 10y agoWas about to share this as well. They are 802.3af PoE compatible now too. Not terribly expensive compared to those listed in the article, especially when installing 70+ in a hotel.
- sunjain 10y agoIn terms of ease of setup, I don't think any of these can beat Eero. And in spite of Netgear marketing dollars behind, Orbi, I hope EERO maintains the lead in this space, as they were the first one to push for mesh networking in consumer Wifi space.
- Terretta 10y agoNote that out of the box, Airport does two step wireless network extension, super easily. It supports "extend your network" as hub spoke leaf model, with both wired-to-wireless bases (hubs) and wireless-to-wireless extenders / relays (spokes), and devices (leaves) will connect to strongest spokes or hubs as you roam. You can have multiple wired-to-wired and wired-to-wireless bases on the same network each with its own wireless-to-wireless extenders or relays. This has worked and been solid (no reboots needed) for years. Use the full size tower for hubs and airport expresses for spokes.
- myrandomcomment 10y agoI have the UniFi system. 3 story house. One AP each level centered. One AP in the external office (building attached to external garage). I use one UniFi PoE switch in the house and one in the office (2xCat6A between them). FreeNAS mini attached via 2x1G (4x4TB disc, 2x128G SSD as L2ARC & ZIL). UniFi CloudKey and UniFi Security Gateway. I am an engineer ;) For my less technical friends I highly recommend them Eero system.
- asdf333 10y agodo these things handle moving from one zone to another while something like facetime is running? this has always been an issue i haven't been able to solve.
- hashin 10y agoHave anyone tried building a Mesh using ESP8266 and custom hardware for signal enhancement? I am working on a similar project and is interested to know if anyone have had success with hardware addons like external antenna to build a reliable solution? The chip capabilities are enough to run any low level to moderate load applications like monitoring, actuating and streaming. It is the hardware that I am doubtful about.
- wtallis 10y agoWith only 96KB of data RAM, I don't see how the ESP8266 could be suitable for store-and-forward relaying of aggregated WiFi frames in a moderately busy channel environment where the device isn't guaranteed the immediate opportunity to retransmit what was just received. I don't think RF power would matter, because the computational resources just don't seem sufficient for the mesh to support more than one omnidirectional data stream passing through each node.
- Domenic_S 10y agoI'm connected to a non-HD Amplifi right now over 802.11ac. Dunno what they're smoking over there. Says so right on the product page: https://store.amplifi.com/amplifi/amplifi-119.html https://store.amplifi.com/amplifi/amplifi-119.html
- baggachipz 10y agoThe non-HD base station does ac; the mesh extension points do not.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- Yizahi 10y agoI had tried once building something like this mesh - a router with several wifi range extenders sold separately. In my case it was a setup in the apartment with lots of metal in concrete panels, so wireless reception is awful (50-100% signal loss after a single wall). Well it didn't work at all - REs started and worked ok and I did see high WiFi signal, but throughput was horrible - very low speed and regular pauses when no traffic at all was passing through REs. Settings, RE positioning, channels or bands didn't matter. In the end I just used wired network with access points, more expensive but at least it works. I suggest that all these mesh kits should be bought only when return option is available because they may not work in some cases.
- pricechild 10y ago> It’s the only mesh kit we tested that is fully configurable and usable without an Internet connection, and it’s also the only one that provides the full, deep feature set that technical users expect from a high-end router, including plenty of Ethernet ports on both units. I'm amazed... "and usable" implies some of these kits will go down if you lose your internet connection. Not just that they won't be configurable?
- JustSomeNobody 10y ago> Every other kit we tested relies on a smartphone app and cloud services for configuration, which means if your Internet goes down, your home network—partially or even entirely—goes down with it. I am getting so tired of this. Why are engineers working for companies that build stuff like this? This is consumer hostile.
- chilie 10y agoMaybe I'm missing something obvious, but what would most users need to be able to use the network for if the internet is down? The only use case I can think of is transferring files around? Do you think that's so common amongst most users?
- untog 10y agoMulti room DVRs are one thing that comes to mind. And as more and more IoT devices come out, this'll get more important.
- izacus 10y agoWatching a movie or listening to music stored on your NAS. Turning your "smart" light off and on. Using your remote (since even those are cloud connected now). You know, everyday stuff, for which modern IoT equivalents somehow need internet connectivity to work.
- ausjke 10y agoBuilt a wisp-mesh product a few years ago for a client, in the past mesh-wifi was really just for enterprise and city-wide projects, and never got widely deployed anywhere. Surprisingly it is getting into homes these days, assuming the covering area is large. For me I'm using AP + a few extenders these days and they worked just fine and are much cheaper.
- bugmen0t 10y agoMost wifi hardware supports being both AP and client at the same time. This way, I've extended my wifi signal for just 20 bucks (Bought a netgear ex2700 and flashed openwrt. I made it join my existing wifi and create an AP with a distinct SSID on the same interface and channel)
- lectrice 10y agoAirTies Air 4920. Google Wifi does much of the same, but the original is better (and 3x3 as opposed to Google's 2x2). Small access points that don't take up much space, very good client steering and band steering so you're always hooked up to the best AP without thinking about it.