I am looking for a wifi mesh system to improve the coverage in my home. I looked around and found a cheap solution with decent reviews, the Halo 50G by Mercusys (TP Link). I am not a fan of super cheap, super easy to use “magical” solutions, and within minutes of connecting just the access point I was seeing calls to the likes of google, facebook, amazon, etc in my network coming from the device. Not ideal.
I also found that Ubiquiti and Netgear may be the best options out there, but the prices I found are north of 600€ and I can not afford to pay that much right now.
So, my question is: Is there any wifi mesh system that is not using my network against me and does not empty my wallet? I am based in Europe and would like something under 200€ if possible, and ready to buy from the shelf.
Thank you for reading and for any recommendation.
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Interesting. When I upgraded from WiFi 5 to WiFi 6 it was a significant upgrade but there are a ton of other factors that play into what actual speeds a user may get.
I was more just interested in getting more details about OPs needs as OP basically only provided a budget, which makes it a bit difficult to give advice.
Interesting. What do you get on wifi 6? On what hardware?
For wifi 6 I have unifi ap 6 lite, unifi Express gateway in ap mode and my ISPs router, some Telekom own hardware IIRC.
For wifi 5 I tested mainly unifi ac lite (the first gen). I got around 300mbps from a raspberry pi with hostapd, but that hardly counts as an access point…
For the past 5ish years I had google WiFi pucks (gen 1, ac1200). 4 pucks, one as the router 3 as APs. 3/4 pucks were wired.
Switched over to using a NanoPi R4S (4GB version) as my router and 2x ZyXEL NWA50AX Pros for my APs. The cost for this is actually right around OPs budget, maybe a bit over.
The biggest improvements, in terms of speed for me, are devices that are WiFi 6 capable now getting much better wireless speeds (not super surprising), some going from around 200mbps to about 600mbps.
To be clear there there are over 30 devices on my network spread over 2000 sqft so I am a bit reluctant to reduce everything to a couple of speed tests when there are other factors involved.