106 PCWorld OCTOBER 2020HERE’S HOW SPEED UP YOUR HOME INTERNET ON THE CHEAP
others, this is alleviated with tri-band routers.
These routers feature a 2.4GHz band and two
5GHz bands. When set up as a mesh system,
this allows for, say, one of the 5GHz bands to
be completely dedicated to the wireless
backhaul, leaving more bandwidth for PCs or
other devices.
The problem for me is these systems
aren’t that cheap. When paired with the
latest Wi-Fi 6 or 802.11ax, they’re downright
painful to buy, though a delight to use. You
can read about my colleague Michael
Simon’s experience putting down a lot of
scratch for a tri-band Netgear Orbi system
(go.pcworld.com/ntob).
While 802.11ax is pretty awesome and we
do have one 802.11ax/Wi-Fi 6 laptop in use,the vast majority of our hardware is Wi-Fi
5/802.11ac or older. Looking for a way to eke
out more performance without plunking down
$600 to $700 on a set of high-end 802.11ax
tri-band mesh routers, I went with the counter-
intuitive idea of running a wired backhaul.WIRED BACKHAUL
Yes, it may make no sense to build out a
wireless mesh setup to avoid wires—and then
actually end up running wires. But creating a
wired backhaul was definitely the cheapest
way to get more performance.
Mesh networks can either eat wireless
bandwidth to talk amongst themselves—or
they can eat wired bandwidth. By stringing an
ethernet cable between my two routers, I
would essentially get
many of the benefits
of a tri-band mesh
system without the
cost. For $26 (for a
125-foot ethernet
cable), I was able to
double and triple the
speeds on laptops
connecting to the
RT-1900P.AND THEN
I GOT
CHEAPER
In fact, rather than
For $17, I was able to get a crimper, CAT5 connectors, and a cable checker. spend $26 on a