I’m helping a neighbour who needs to get a wifi network going and was thinking mesh, well she actually also asked about mesh because she doesn’t want to wire anything, the budget is anyway also too tight at this stage for wiring. She has 10 Mbps wireless internet, so we are not exactly going for any speed records here.
Only the usual culprits, phones, tablets, smart TV and laptops.
It’s a weird house with walls which is quite thick, I walked around checking signal with one of my AP’s, and think at least 3 mesh AP’s will do the job to cover the house and outside pool / braai area.
Budget is a bit tight, around R3k to R4k.
I checked Scoop and see options within the budget, but I’m not familiar with brands like Cudy, Reyee and Tenda which seams to be quite well priced. Browsing all over it seams TP-Link mesh is also quite popular, I’ve had TP-Link equipment for years, some which is still doing duty in my network and I can’t really fault it.
Anyone with mesh systems or experience with mesh, what would you recommend I look at which will fall in the budget?
Really avoid mesh at all costs if you can. One decent, well-placed AP should be sufficient for most houses. I recall a decent Asus AP servicing a 1000m2 house pretty well. If their place is really huge, probably best to go for Ubiquity APs.
When it comes to wireless equipment, you get what you pay for.
Ubiquiti and budget don’t go in the same sentence, plus Ubiquiti will be total overkill for them.
As said I did some testing using one of my AP’s, not even a single Unifi Lite will cut it in that place because of the thick walls. I didn’t believe it myself at first, looks like triple brick walls if not more.
I have kinda a house like that, Some thick walls etc etc. Forget about mesh wireless. I will bite ya. Wire the AP’s Go secondhand with something like Microtik or TP-Link. I had to use Ubiquiti in the end.
You can get a Ubiquity AP Lite for R2000. If you were planning on spending less than that for a difficult house, it’s just going to lead to disappointment.
And as everyone has stated, all APs need to be wired. Wireless repeaters are just a mess. Especially budget ones.
I also had to look at AP’s a couple of months ago, and back then there was a severe Ubiquiti stock shortage.
I ended up going with Reyee, depending on how much of a “pro-sumer” you are it could be a brilliant AP.
Some models even support the OpenWRT firmware.
I am happy-ish with my Reyee RG-EW1800GX Pro.
But since the Ubiquiti WiFi 6 AP’s are back in stock I am considering going back to Ubiquiti (The Reyee did outperform my Ubiquiti AmpliFi HD but I want the UniFi OS)
I have a budget mesh system, the mercusys Halo H50G and they all cabled up and run as access points from the main router, and work pretty well. They do need a reboot now and again but for the price I am happy and they have 3 network points on each unit so can cable up devices where necessary.