Looking for a stronger router with better distance.
- Thread starter johnnyb58
- Start date
A lot of people have been telling about the Mesh WiFi 6 System and that it will eventually replace all the routers. I have never heard of a Mesh WiFi System before a few days ago and don't know much about it so I checked out a few Youtube videos on it and I'm impressed. My wife says to wait a bit because Amazon is supposed to be having some sales on it soon, but I don't know where she gets her information. Anyway I'm going to hold off and learn more about this Mesh system.
It just kills me to think of all the time and money I spent back in the '90s on wiring my house up with coax cable for TV and ethernet cables for computers including speaker wiring for surround sound throughout my house and outside patio. Now all that is going to be or is obsolete and I still have spools of coax, ethernet, and speaker wire that I spent $1000s on.
I mean you could just use those, even the cat5e standard was revised to officially support 2.5gbe at full distance. MoCA2.5 would be handy if you had a coax run somewhere that you needed coverage outside of the current broadcast area.
Mesh is 'convenient' but it's not some groundbreaking new development. It's the same concept as a repeater except you have a dedicated backhaul radio. Up to you which is most appealing, for 'ease of setup' and a deployment with the least physical dependencies it's not a bad play.
The vast majority of the time you'd get better performance with a wired backhaul however. I'd also be a little cautious with a 6 ghz mesh system, while it's the latest/fastest if you're already having distance issues then those would be exacerbated as the signal is more easily absorbed by materials/flesh/droplets/glass/etc.
I understand that you sacrifice range for speed, but you only need to buy another module and all the ones I looked at already had dual band or more.
I asked here in this forum a number of times about adding a repeater to extend the range of my existing router and never got an applicable solution. I even spent $60 on a recommended remote WIFI Antenna, but it needed another router with screw in antenna which I didn’t have so it sits in a box as a total waist of money. I’m told that with the MESH, all I need to do is plug another module into an AC power outlet and its done.
Repeaters are garbage, they rebroadcast over the same frequency, causing their own interference. You would drag down the rest of your environment by adding a repeater. The difference between 'repeater' and 'mesh' is that mesh has a dedicated backhaul that doesn't interfere with the client facing radio.
But yes, with a wireless backhaul and a wireless client facing side, the only thing left is to apply power to the device. You trade performance for convenience.
I see the word "backhaul" mentioned a lot, but what does that actually mean?
Thanks