Update as I have been running mine for a while and its working great I bought more to clear final holes, the Huawei Wifi APs I mentioned above would work well for you here and their sister company Honor is on offer at £30 a router right now, essentially offers similar functionality. https://www.hihonor.com/unitedkingdom/product/honor-router-3/ Can be meshed I have been using 4 and never had as good wireless coverage, I have wired the backhaul to two and run two on wifi alone, obviously not having a dedicated wifi backhaul on non wired APs reduces repeated wifi internet connection to wifi devices but direct connected LAN devices get full speeds over the wifi bridge, routers placed opposite ends of my house, front to back plus from upstairs to downstairs, ~9m router to router, are seeing 350-400Mb bandwidth bettering my powerlines on bandwidth and latency, from one room to the next through one brick wall ~4.5-5m router to router, I was seeing ~500-600Mb. Mesh side works well, even ipad that hung on to low signal wifi extenders on the old setup play nice between APs and transition well despite being wifi 5, so no complaints of slow Internet because it's still connected to upstairs AP with low signal when her indoors is sat next to main router downstairs You could also set it up to be just an AP connected by ethernet cable to PC for better positioning for signal in your daughters room, many options. Whilst the port setup is 1x wan 3x lan, so long as there's nothing serving a network on wan you can use as a mesh ap with 4x lan devices.
Thank you again @sandys for your valuable input, also @nimbu for your home insight too. Procrastination has ensued this last month, helped by 2 injuries and and expensive car month last month. Spoiler The car needed a big service, required rear discs and pads all round which were a surprise. Worse came a week later when my supposedly fixed water leak came to a head as a dead water pump. That's a £600 hole in the January finances... New SH3 has helped a bit, and resurrecting the Virgin boosters may have too. That said, my daughter had some drop outs this morning, but the WiFi is more stable overall. I will want to dispense with Virgin WiFi, but am confused as ever as to the solution. Those cheap Honor routers look promising. How about if I have one next to the hub in the living room and wire a second into my existing powerline link to upstairs? Will that mesh and let the powerline take some backhaul strain?
You could do that but is your powerline fast enough, this wifi setup is faster than my AV2000s in my house.
I assume that your daughters machine can be wired in to AP then you would get full internet speed, originally I had my daughters machine in our new classroom/office on wifi so route to internet was a: PCwifi - b:wifi AX3 - c:Wifi AX3 -> router so my 160Mb fibre connection to internet was approximately halved to 80Mb, she could still get 200odd Mb from LAN devices on c, probably low because her wifi antenna is at back of machine up against the wall so not ideal Taking the PC wired to the AX3 in her room, it took that wifi repeater stage out of the equation and she got full 160Mb over the AX3-AX3 connection and ~extra speed between lan devices upwards of 400Mb as mentioned between C and B, if I had faster internet she would get that. anything else taking wifi up in the second office room is still getting halve internet due to lack of backhaul but it is good coverage low loss internet whereas when it wasn't meshed what could reach the office from the router was unpredictable and not very responsive. If you want wifi mesh with a wifi backhaul the Tenda MW12 with its tri band setup looks like Good value at about £170 for 2 nodes, not sure if there are cheaper. Depending on how fast your internet is you can separate 5Ghz and 2.4Ghz to use one for devices and one for backhaul on the Honor but 2.4Ghz is not that fast and subject to a lot of devices contending for the channels so I found it as fast just doing the repeating thing on 5Ghz, YMMV.
Slight derail, as I am just home from work and my daughter says that her PC WiFi Has been really flakey today, but her iPhone in the same room has been fine. Took a quick look to see how it's setup. It's a pre installed M.2 Wifi card in a metal cage. Device Manager says it's a Qualcomm Atheros QCA61x4, which I don't recall as a great card. Is it worth a punt on an Intel replacement for £20 or so? They seem to be the best reckoned ones IIRC. Still considering the dual Honors @sandys suggested. I could put one in her room and wire her PC in, but would rather the upstairs one was the opposite side of the house to balance things up a bit. Her room is above the living room, which would put all the WiFis on one side of the house.
Yes, it cost next to nothing for an AX200/AX210 but really it could be antenna positioning, my daughters PC has its antenna at the rear of PC up against the wall, under an desk next to an nice metal cabinet, all bad things really, wiring her into the AP boosted things up. Buy one of these honor things, setup as AP and use a bit of ethernet cable to give you better antenna positioning. BTW, I realize I hadn't got 160Mhz setup, I am now maxing my Gb LAN ports over Wifi
V late follow up... The WIFi on that PC has been OK, but the signal strength on the machine in the same room as the router collapsed to a crawl a few weeks ago. It was pitiful, in the Kb/s range... Fiddled for a while, then went on another PC to look for updated drivers, as it looked like Win 10 had updated and the card wasn't happy. Newer driver went straight on and the signal climbed to 70Mb/s; result! It's school again sohave revisited the WiFi distribution problem, and have decided to go for a pair of TP-Link Deco M9 Plus mesh units. One downstairs by the modem and one upstairs for starters. I have a 5 port Gigabit switch, so will go from the Virgin Hub to that, wire to the other devices that need it, and Wifi from the M9. The M9 looks like it's well worth having as it's tri band to deal with its own backhaul. I do have a 1200AV Powerline set to do 'wired' backhaul if that helps. I have read that the wireless backhaul is typically better than most powerline connections, but not as good as a dedicated ethernet cable.
Arboreal, we have been in exactly the came situation.... Wife is working from home and our Virgin "Super" hub started playing up last Monday after they performed an update on the network. Several phonecalls to their call center didn't work (diagnostics, turn it off/on etc). We have all suffered the same problem with the WiFi not connecting on various devices (laptops, mobiles, tablets) with the password not being recognised or resetting to factory mode, then switching back. FOR A SIMPLE SHORT TERM SOLUTION..... Over the weekend I went into the router settings and re entered my current WiFi access password (exactly as it was already actually shown as being in settings anyway?!?) and subsequently I haven't had any issues for at least 48 hours on any devices (including my wife's laptop/vpn) . Give it a go, it might help, certainly worked for us and seems more than just a coincidence .
Thanks @Lankius Maximus, that is an interesting discovery. I'll hop on when I get home and have a go. I think the mesh will be a good thing anyway, as the V Hub is infamous for its WiFi quality
Wireless has the potential to be better than wired if specced correctly, not sure that will be the case for the M9, its specs suggest only 867Mbps, which is remarkably low for a 4x4 MIMO 5Ghz, spec sheet must be incorrect? I'd imagine it should be able to do a minimum of 867 and if as I suspect it is not counting aggregate bandwidth well over Gb LAN capability on its Backhaul channel which I would imagine your powerline won't match ( your powerline is unlikely to match 867 TBH) on my setup I have wired backhaul and the wire is the limiting factor between my APs at 1Gb as doing a point to point Wifi 6 connection I get far more. Obviously a dedicated wire is not subject to wifi client interference and general wifi contention if you have a house fuill of devices, so a wire is still better. I recently switched to VM and the Hub4 was worse for WIFI than my Sky router, so can understand your need for something, I've no issue here as I have a mesh setup already.
OK, I had decided on a pair of TP-Link Deco M9s, which are about £200, but have just found a pair of Netgear Orbi RBR 50s locally for £50, which seems a really cheap deal. Anyone have any experience with the Orbis?
I have some Zyxel nwa1132ac access points that run off Poe put at opposite ends of the house, wired..they were around 30quid each and work really well. Upstairs is always tricky..I actually use an orbi for the first floor and it's satellite wifi meshed to the attic which is where the office is...I get around 250mbps in attic and around 300-350 on first floor...full 500 on ground floor
