Asus airmesh/aimesh networks

Khraul

Hey everyone,

I'm looking to improve the wifi in my house, currently in a three story townhouse with the modem/router coming in on the bottom floor. The top floor where the bedrooms are gets decent signal but it could be significantly better for my sons PS4 in his bedroom and our various streaming devices upstairs.

Moving the modem and router would mean rewiring the house, which I really don't want to do, and the inline extenders you plug in your wall have yielded such poor results that I just returned them.

How well would a mesh network work? I have zero experience with them. I was browsing new routers and realized my current asus router is "aimesh" compatible, so extending my network might be as easy as buying a compatible upgrade.

Thanks in advance

Aioua

I don't have any experience with the ASUS mesh stuff. How old is your router? The technology has improved quite a bit recently. That might be your cheapest route since you'll only need to buy satellites.

Otherwise the big systems out there that are generally pretty good:

Google WiFi
+ cheap
+ simple
- Google gets all your data and does who knows what with it as usual
- you get what you pay for, likely lower speeds

Eero
+ supposedly the best
- expensive

Orbi
+ middle option (it's what I have)
+ you can get a router with a built-in cable modem which is nice
- a bit clunker interface than the other two

Velop
- I've only heard bad things

There was a recent H/A thread about them, too:
https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/221563/recommend-a-wireless-mesh-system#latest

Khraul

Cool, I'll check that thread

My current router is only a couple of years old and the app with it shows it's airmesh compatible. I'd figured I'd upgrade it and use it as the satellite. The cost of the standalone mesh networks has kept me from even looking at them.

I have warhammer miniatures to buy

Khraul

Follow up question... The Eero looks like it might be worth spending the money on, but it only has one ethernet on the back and I'd like to keep a wired connection to my PC and PS4 in my office while running Wifi to the rest of the house (including other game systems upstairs).

In that case do I turn off the wifi on the existing router and use the eero in bridge mode?

And is this worth doing or does it cause weird nat problems with the wifi fed gaming systems or just defeat the purpose of running the eero in the first place?

Shadowfire

That will cause the NAT issues you mentioned. You should remove the other router from the equation entirely.

Better option if you want Eero is to just attach a switch to the open Ethernet port on the unit. That's what I did in the office and living room.

Khraul

Shadowfire wrote: »

That will cause the NAT issues you mentioned. You should remove the other router from the equation entirely.

Better option if you want Eero is to just attach a switch to the open Ethernet port on the unit. That's what I did in the office and living room.

Ahhh, ok. That's what is suspected.

As techie as I am I know very little about networking... Having just read what a switch does, any recommendations on which one to buy?

Shadowfire

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Any switch should do the job as long as it's a gigabit switch. Netgear and Linksys make some cheap ones. Both of the ones in my house are Linksys.