Advice sought on updating my home wifi!

In My Humble Opinion
1

Thanks in advance for advice and help.

At present I have 3 Apple airports (one actually being a time capsule), all wired by Ethernet to my internet modem/router. They are “meshed” so all running the same wifi network name. My house is over several levels and has stone, concrete and metal walls and floors in various places, so 3 wifi sources are the minimum. I may need a fourth though!

Our bandwidth needs aren’t great, there’s just the two of us here and we don’t do a lot of streaming on multiple devices at once. All up we have 1 smart TV, 2 phones, 1 iPad, and 2 computers online all the time.

It basically works fine, but I’m looking to update to wifi 6, 6e or 7 (or wait for 8?). The time capsule has died twice (hard disk) so it’s probably time to upgrade, and to separate the wifi and backup functions.

The new wrinkle is we’ve installed a heat pump upstairs outdoors, which uses 2.4ghz to connect to our wifi, BUT the reception there is marginal - its control box is attached to a metal fence on the side away from the nearest wifi source. Today it dropped off wifi entirely, putting my iPhone next to it saw no wifi at all. An hour later there was one bar and it was back online. I guess that is likely interference from neighbours?

I’m looking at Eero equipment, as I already have their app and am support for another wifi network that uses Eero already.

What I think I’ll have to do is run another Ethernet cable to as close to the heat pump as I can (while still indoors) and put a 4th wifi node there. And of course replace the other 3 with compatible Eero nodes.

I’ve gone back and forth on which wifi standard to move to; 6 is much cheaper and is probably enough for our needs, but OTOH I always like to be in the latest! And range and penetration are issues here.

As I understand it, they all can use 2.4ghz to talk to the heat pump, and that frequency has the best range/penetrating power, is that right? How does channel width figure into this, and how is that set?

And finally I see Eero offer kits for (say) wifi 7 or wifi 7 Pro - what is the actual difference there? Is it worth the extra?

Thanks all!

2

2.4 GHz has the best range and penetrating power, but it also is more likely to suffer from interference issues. Microwave ovens also work on approx. 2.4 GHz as do many other devices. 5 GHz doesn’t penetrate walls quite as well, but is less likely to suffer from interference issues.

Most likely.

Is the heat pump 2.4 GHz only or can it be switched over to 5 GHz?

Eero wifi 7 is dual band 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz. Eero wifi 7 Pro is tri-band, 2.4 GHz, 5 GHz, and 6 GHz.

While the Pro is a higher performance device and is generally “better”, I don’t see anything in your post that makes me think you’ll get any noticeable benefit from the Pro. Your usage doesn’t need the higher horsepower.

3

Only 2.4ghz. So it seems I’ll need that fourth node, and have to get ethernet up near the heat pump somehow!

Given how cheap they are during the current sales I’m thinking of getting the 7 Pro anyway; apart from anything else using the 6ghz band will presumably have little to no interference from neighbours.

Thanks a lot for the advice!

4

Yes, because penetration with 6Ghz is even worse than with 5Ghz.

Before spending too much more on 6Ghz, make sure you have devices that can support it. Otherwise you’re just setting off a chain reaction of upgrades (phones, laptops, tablets), which will make it much more expensive than the non-6 Ghz option.

Channel width is important for total speed, but it also can increase interference, because it spans multiple smaller channels. For example, 5Ghz 80Mhz channel 155 uses all of the airwaves of regular (20Mhz) channels 149-161. If you can use wider channels without interference, then it should perform better, but if you’re in an area with lots of interference narrower channels might actually perform better.

On 2.4Ghz I’d just use the narrowest channel. Nothing that cares about speed should be on 2.4 anyway. If you have an old streaming device that only does 2.4, and it has problems, then maybe you need to upgrade to one that can handle 5Ghz.

If running an ethernet cable near the heat pump to add another WiFi access point is difficult, then a WiFi extender is probably good enough. You can get cheap ones that plug into an outlet and will create another WiFi network that your heat pump can connect to. So you’d have AskanceWifi and then AskanceWifi-ext. The extenders add latency and slow things down, but that shouldn’t matter for the heat pump.

5

We have iPhone 16, 17, 4gen iPad, 2024 iMac - pretty sure they can all handle 6ghz

I’ve not had to deal with channel width before - this is a config option in the Eero app I’d assume?

Thanks!

6

I wanted to share some recent anecdotal experience with a home wifi mesh… apparently, it’s possible to have too many mesh nodes in too small a space.

I was having some connectivity issues recently, especially with things that were further away from the “main” mesh node (the one that was connected to the cable modem and acting as a router). Previously, we had two nodes, one at the modem and one at the center of the house. I added an additional two more nodes. This did improve the range quite a bit — things were more stably connected after that — but it drastically reduced the bandwidth, to the point where it was impossible to stream higher-res videos smoothly anymore.

We have gigabit cable. Hardwired to the main node, I get about 800-850 Mbps. Some amount of loss is no big deal. Over WiFi, I would get about 300 - 400 Mbps with two nodes. With four nodes, that became about 25-60 Mbps, even on 5 GHz. I didn’t realize how big of an impact this could make until everything started stuttering all the time. I unplugged the two nodes and the speeds shot back up to several hundred, but the further away devices stopped being able to connect as stably. As an experiment, I tried only having one node active (basically reducing the mesh to a single router/access point), and speeds went even higher, to like 500-600 Mbps. 5 vs 6 GHz didn’t make much of a difference; the devices would connect as they wished, and I couldn’t force them to choose one or the other.

The tests were done with recent-ish devices, like M4/M2 Macs, Pixel 10 phones, etc. The routers are Nest Wifi Pro, Google’s 6e mesh router. I also tried the Wyze ones and those were even worse. I don’t know if Eero would be better. I think some of them have dedicated wireless backhauls… mine is supposed to, but it’s still much worse than hardwiring.

If you can hardwire any of the nodes, it would be better. Absent that, if simply adding nodes doesn’t help, you might try making a 2.4 GHz-only access point just for the heat pump, while using 5 GHz or 6 GHz for everything else. Sadly there is a tradeoff between range and bandwidth, and devices will unpredictably frequency-jump if they all share the same SSIDs. For anything closer to the router(s), it’s better to force them stay on 5 or 6 (by having separate SSIDs by frequency) and not risk them accidentally hopping to 2.4.

Some version of WiFi (maybe 7?) is supposed to be able to merge multiple frequencies together and use them all together, but I haven’t really kept up… I’d be surprised if it ended up actually working better…

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Thanks, although I already have a mesh so I don’t think this will be an issue! My current 3 nodes are separated by floors and/or stone walls which is why I have 3 at all. Given that the newer standards have lower penetration, I’m not expecting any frequency clashes like you are probably getting.