I just heard about Eero, a new mesh networking system designed specifically for the home, and am intrigued, because we have a large house and some dead spots. Eero gets rave reviews, and is apparently very easy to set up. But it’s quite expensive: $500 for three units.
Amazon suggested Ubiquiti, which is $175 for three units, and except for lacking an app (which is a cool, if perhaps not essential, feature of Eero), and not being designed specifically for very simple setup, it seems capable of doing about the same job. And it has more advanced security features, which is one of the most common criticisms of Eero. (Although it’s claimed Eero may add this and other features later.)
I currently have a Motorola router and a wired range extender to cover our 4,600-sq-ft house. Speed is not great and we don’t get strong coverage in all rooms. Also, the two have different SSIDs, so sometimes you have to manually switch your device to the closer one.
It looks to me like either of these two systems should be able to solve those problems, although in either case I might have to add a fourth unit to get total coverage.
Any thoughts about the pros and cons of these two systems? Is Eero really worth three times the Ubiquiti system? Thanks.
I have never used either system, but I can give some general feedback. First of all there are far cheaper Wi-Fi repeaters. I don’t see that they’re doing anything special except for the app which seems fairly useless. Once you set up your system there isn’t a lot of call for making changes and you really only need to make the changes on the base system which usually has a built in management website.
I use this one this one and it works well enough. Set up is simple and you just forget it. Not sure why you need two ssids.
WiFi sucks over distance. Try something like powerline networking as long as the rooms you want to connect are on the same circuit:
Repeaters slow down even as they increase range, because now you’re adding extra hops. Router -> repeater -> repeater -> client -> repeater -> repeater -> router, and they all have to work harder to sort out the extra noise from all the repeaters sharing their spectrum.
Just from a quick look at the website, this looks to be at most an attempt to take some enterprise-level controller stuff into a home system, where there’s some intelligence from a central controller that’s getting feedback from all of the wireless devices in the building/network and adjusting things based on what all of the devices see in the spectrum.
And that’s at most–it’s hard to tell for sure that’s it’s not just a crappy app and a bunch of repeaters.
For $500, I’d rather run (or hire somebody to run) cable to the other side of your house/upstairs and put another router on the other end. I haven’t done anything like this in years, so I forget the details, but ISTR having to spoof an address on the second router. You should be able to find a guide online in seconds.
Alternatively, or additionally, if you have an area of the house that needs connection but can use LAN cable (like your PC or Xbox or printer), then run cable there from your modem/router and terminate with a wired switch. They are cheap (<$30 for your purposes) and you (probably) won’t have to mess around with settings.
(Have lived in big old houses that make the above necessary but easy enough to do.)
I’m not sure if my methods would be any better than what you have already done–I’ve never used a “range extender”–but worked great for me. And we have had pretty heavy usage on multiple nodes periodically. The biggest problem that took ages for me to DX was our hard-wired security system, which ran interference constantly. :rolleyes:
I’d go with The Wirecutter’s primo “upgrade” pick of the Netgear R6400 for $130 and if that doesn’t solve all your range problems on it’s own, then, and only then, extend the network out from that in whichever way makes the best sense. Check out the reviews on Amazon pertaining to range - I’d bet it will have you covered.
I actually used another router that was identical to my main one, just because I happened to have an extra one. It was one that had a few ports on it plus wifi. But this being almost ten years ago, I don’t recall all the details. I believe I started it out by plugging it into another cable outlet (as in coax cable) and spoofing the MAC. Later we ran Ethernet cable through other parts of the house, and I put the second router on that instead, as well as the wired switch in the office. This made it easier to be able to share files and printers on the home network.
I’m not a network gal. We were doing some work out of the home and I kind of learned what we needed when an issue came up. And promptly forgot most of it. :o