connection viable for gaming or streaming
video – occasional emails and web browsing
would be your limit.
Mesh Wi-Fi
If one router isn’t good enough to cover the
furthest reaches of your home, there are
currently two main options for solving that
problem without resorting to laying extra
cable. The first is the classic Wi-Fi extender.
These devices will simply connect to the
signal from your router and then project their
own Wi-Fi signal to which you can connect.
They can do the job at a push but tend to
have a couple of key problems. The first is
that the more affordable units – under £100
- often just aren’t very fast or powerful. You
might get one extra room’s worth of extended
range but at greatly reduced speeds and
increased pings.
The second is that basic units don’t tend
to have a simple setup when it comes to
managing the SSIDs (the name of your
network as it shows up on devices) and how
devices move between your router’s signal
and the extender’s signal.
You'll either have to set up different SSIDs
for the extender, so you might end up with
a total of four Wi-Fi signals spread around
your home (one for each band, for the router
and extender), or you can set the router and
extender to all use the same SSID. If you do
this, however, your client device may struggle
to actually connect to the best signal – your
laptop might insist on trying to connect to the
router’s signal when the extender has the
stronger signal, or vice versa.
Meanwhile, the more sophisticated
extenders, which that can often tap into
mesh Wi-Fi networks as outlined below,
can be expensive. The Netgear EAX20 thatintegrates with the company’s Orbi mesh
system, for example, costs £200 inc VAT.
Instead, the far better solution to this
problem, generally, is to opt for a mesh
Wi-Fi system. These use the same principle
of picking up an existing Wi-Fi signal and
extending it, but take a much more proactive,
sophisticated approach to managing which
signal a client device uses for its connection.
They ensure the fastest route is taken
for any given client device or load balance
across multiple mesh nodes (routers) if
the network is in high demand, all while
only presenting a single SSID to your client
devices, so you never need to hop betweensignals. Occasionally, you might end up on
a non-ideal signal path, but in our experience
they’re pretty reliable.
Each of the major router manufacturers
now has its own mesh system – Netgear Orbi,
Linksy Velop, TP-Link Deco and more – while
devices such as Google Wi-Fi, BT Whole
Home Wi-Fi and Amazon Eero use the same
basic principle. Some systems use dedicated
routers, and you can then buy either other
routers or just extenders that mesh into the
same system (such as Netgear), or some just
use the same small nodes for all purposes.
Whichever setup you choose, according to
our previous testing, they all tend to deliver
reliably on their promise of effortless and
speedy range extension. However, there are a
few downsides. The first is that they tend not
to deliver the utmost in peak performance,
depending on the system you use.
Larger router-like nodes, such as the
routers in our Labs test (most of which
are compatible with the company’s mesh
systems), can deliver high peak speeds but
the smaller puck-like units, such as Amazon
Eero and Google Wi-Fi, tend to lag behind.
The second issue is price. Even those
smaller units tend to cost close to £100
each – although the Amazon Eero is currently
just £55 – so by the time you’ve bought the
several units you need to span a larger home,
the cost can really add up. What’s more, if you
want the most powerful, speedy system that
uses the latest Wi-Fi 6 tech (Eero and Google
Wi-Fi are only Wi-Fi 5), you can be looking at
£200-£300 per node.
The final potential issue is that by stringing
together several Wi-Fi nodes, you’re
inherently introducing a greater delay to the
signal, as the data has to be packaged up for
sending over Wi-Fi, decoded then repackaged
and resent several times. All of which can
result in a higher ping.Even our aging Devolo 9225 powerline kit proved fast and reliable at long range
The Devolo Magic 2 LAN proved that powerline has
its limitations, as it didn’t significantly outperform its
much older siblingTHE NODES OF A MESH NETWORK ONLY PRESENT
A SINGLE SSID TO YOUR CLIENT DEVICES, SO YOU
NEVER NEED TO HOP BETWEEN SIGNALSFEATURE / DEEP DIVE