Hi all
Looking to buy a mesh network, live in a 2 story 1900"s house and city fibre put in my internet in the kitchen at the rear of the house so not idea. Not looking to spend a lot of cash around the £150 mark.
The wifi we are getting is stable but with a ticket submitted to cityfibre by Yayzi im just making sure that its stable as can be. Any ideas are welcome.
This should be a simple answer, sadly it has a lot of variables to consider that make it less so.
Yayzi supply the TP Link Aginet routers, which is basically TP Link’s consumer Deco kit with remote management enabled. Adding additional Aginet nodes should be cheap and easy, sadly they’re just not easily sourced and the prices are about twice what they should be (I can find them around the £90 mark for one). My suggestion would be Deco, they’re inexpensive, perform well and are easily expanded if needed. Personally I use the X20’s and between floors over wireless generally I see 800Mbit max, connect them to the rest of the network via cable and you can get near gigabit speeds in the same room if your device supports wifi6. If you look on Amazon (other options like Argos/PCW etc. exist) a pair of x20’s (AX1800) is £129, a three pack of S7’s (AC1900) is £129 and a three pack of M4’s (AC1200) is £99, and the good thing about Deco is they will all work together over different models, so if you buy one now, you can add more later. The speed in brackets is the wifi speed rating, basically the x series supports wifi6 and the other two don’t and are slightly slower. The Agniet router you have now if you’re on the gigabit service is an HX220 and supports AX1800 and basically an X20.
Now the elephant in the room - I have lived in properties of the age you describe, they were generally built using solid brick and in many cases two courses of it, plaster board just didn’t exist. Wifi struggles to get through solid brick walls. The last time I had to sort wifi for a similar property, the only way I could get acceptable coverage in all rooms was running cables from each node back to the router. At a bare minimum I would suggest running a cable to a central location downstairs (eg hall) and putting the main node there followed by a wireless node upstairs on the landing. Obviously I don’t know the layout of your property, but that should give you a decent start in terms of coverage and speed.
Other mesh options are available such as Eero or Google Nest, the former is quite good, the latter I would personally avoid. Also please don’t be tempted by a cheap deal on something nasty like the Tenda kits, they’re just horrible.
Good luck!
1 Like
Thanks for the help Avalon, going to try the wifi 6 extenders and hopefully it will help. But i think long term i might need to route cat6 cables around the house(wife not happy about that i can tell you).
Or if you can, there’s also the option of using a wireless access point on each floor wired back to the router. Some use the extenders to an electrical socket outlet then add the access point in a convenient location on the ceiling but you can’t beat wired ethernet outlets 
Do check out MOCA 2.5 devices if you have coax in the areas you want to reach as this will save you having to run CAT6 as long as you’re not after 10Gb speeds.
Damn you, physics!
I’ve had reasonable success with the TP-Link ethernet-over-powerline kit, which is what got me looking at the PX50 gear recently; it’s not going to give you the same speed as Cat-anything cabling, but it does save a lot of significant-other aggravation. He says, looking at the poorly disguised cable in the corner of his office.
That said, once upon a time three of us got together and pulled Cat5e (this was quite a few years ago) around a friends house by lifting carpets, knocking out behind skirting boards and up a few inches to be in-line with sockets etc. It only took a day to do half a dozen rooms including fishing cables under floors and through ceiling voids, but it did help that one of us was a plumber and had some neat kit for making access holes in floors. Oh and they were recarpeting throughout so we didn’t have to wrestle with carpet stretchers (but we did kneel/lean on plenty of carpet grippers, naturally… evil things)
We were all 15 years younger and fitter, mind. I don’t know if we’d do it now!
There are three main standards for powerline, and I hate all of them equally and without any bias or discrimination. They are begrudgingly acceptable for low bandwidth or temporary connections where running a cable would be impractical, perhaps something where running a cable would cause a trip hazard, or you need to replace a cable at 3am but lifting floorboards wouldn’t go down very well etc.
I knew someone with a similar hatred of EoP; his was based on the amount of RF noise they generate - he was a radio geek and RF noise is the devil, in that world.
My only frustration, on the other hand (being a pragmatist and not at all into radio because I already have too many hobbies, and I never caught the bug for that despite dabbling with packet radio in the early 90s), is that the EoP link between workshop and house occasionally drops and can’t automatically re-establish itself… but then it is running over 20m of SWA, underground, and I regularly upset it with a welder!
For the price if doing that I’d go with cat 8 to future proof all my cabling is
1 Like
5e does 10Gb all day long at domestic install distances eg structured solid core copper upto around the 45m mark, 6 only brings that to 55m and 6a to 100m, but 6a is more difficult to work with and terminate. 8 is rated to 40Gb and a lot of the stuff being sold as 7/8 is nothing of the sort. If you want future proof, drop fibre - my main backhaul link is rated for 400Gb/s at 100m (OM4), if you want to be really future proof then SMF will do 800Gb/s at upto 80km which is effectively what CF are laying 
The price difference on single mode vs multi mode is minimal now upto 100Gb.
2 Likes
im on the 2gb service and can get 2gb over about 15m of cat6 that I terminated myself (not a pro).
Kind of proves my point, your xbox has a 1Gb port, 5e is always rated to 1Gb aka 1024Mbit (it’s also rated for NBASE-T 2.5/5Gb), you pulled 300Mbit which is less than 1Gb, swapped and got 900Mbit, which is again less than 1Gb, neither of those is beyond what 5e will do and won’t magically make your xbox not limited to gigabit - it wasn’t the cable and using any cable certified higher than 5e won’t make your xbox downloads faster.
CAT 6 we use for infrastructure and then either cat 5e or cat 6 patch leads.
So for your AP I would use CAT6 which for domestic speeds should suffice.
CAT5e roll prices seem to be on par if not more expensive 24 AWS stuff.
1 Like