We have had fibre for over a year and it works very well. However that is only within range of the livebox.
We already had a Devolo wifi over power line system to get wifi in other parts of the house where the livebox can’t reach due to thick old farmhouse walls.
The problem is this runs at about 6 Mb/s so we are losing the advantage of fibre speeds. I have been looking at replacing this system and have seen mesh systems advertised. Has anyone got a mesh system and would they care to comment on its ability to extend wifi through thick stone walls etc.
Mesh is OK and pretty much plug and play, but adds latency and can reduce performance overall.
Powerline and a second AP (which is actually what the powerline WiFi extenders do) should be OK, getting only 6Mbps suggests there is a problem though - I’d expect more than that even if you are on separate circuits - though possibly if you have RCBO/DD’s rather than just MCB’s the current transformer would present enough inductance to block the high frequency data signals.
What might get you down to those sort of speeds is if you have a triphasé supply and you have the two powerline adapters on different phases.
The best is to run an Ethernet cable to a second AP (and use a different Wi-Fi channel).
I have a similar issue, but mine is related to a powerline that I have to my gates approx 50m from the house. I also get approx 6mb, and don’t think it’s linked to the capacity of the powerline gear but assuming it’s the electrical wiring that somehow doesn’t allow optimal transfer. I’ve looked at all sorts to try and solve the issue. I don’t think it would work for me, but have you thought about using repeaters?
We’ve been using a Mesh for years. The cheapish Tendu in our case.
They work - you may need to play with the best places for the boxes but apart from that they’re 're painless. If it’s a big house with thick walls you may need extra boxes - but 3 boxes cover 170m2 indoors and around the house to about 20m
A good quality mesh system is fine as long as your walls are not too think, which will degrade the backhaul WiFi. In the past I deployed a Netgear Orbi system with great success but still limited WiFi performance of around 250-300 Mbps, which is on par with my Starlink performance.
More recently I decided to upgrade and now have a UniFi Dream Router feeding dedicated Access Points via Cat6 cable. My internal WiFi performance is now considerably faster than my Starlink download speed and is super reliable! It’s an expensive solution but well worth the investment. I now have separate SSIDs for normal household Internet, my IOT devices, guest access and my NordVPN. The management, network analytics and functionality from UniFi is brilliant! Highly recommended!
Thanks @NotALot for the suggestion. I read fairly mixed reviews on how effective they are as some folks said the speed was reduced significantly. BUT it did look like there was something called point to point where you can set up one to send and one to receive, but for the receiver, would I need to install some sort of router at the other end??
I can’t answer for the throughput as none of properties I’ve installed them on had incoming feeds of more than 50 mbps.
They’re simply a focused exterior WiFi Access Point. Point them where you want coverage and simply camp the devices there onto the network being radiated by the CPE.
Ok thanks - the gates are clear line of sight from the house but the gate intercom is on the other side of the concrete gate pillar. Do you think that would still be ok? Thanks and appreciate the input👍
I feed two buildings with my CPEs and still get 2 bars of WiFi signal indication on the other side of standard French dressed stone farmhouse walls, so a single concrete pillar shouldn’t put the intercom out of coverage.
I don’t think Mesh makes any difference to range, it just means you have one network and your devices switch to the node with the best signal. This is our Devolo network mapped out on their app. It covers the whole house, including the cave and a good chunk of the front and side garden including wifi cameras as far as 30m way. I don’t find the speed an issue.
