Hi,
I currently have fttp and the BT Smart Hub 2.
My house is over three floors and when it was built I had cat 6 cable piped into every room with all cables brought into the office.
I've used hard wired extenders in about 3 areas of the house consisting of an old Netgear Router set up as an extender and 3 dedicated extenders. They are not great and I get the usual issues of multiple SSID's throughout the house which makes devices drop out and have to be manually reconnected. The other point to mention is that I am using a number of switches throughout also as we have hardwired the TV's and PC's we have.
Im also trying to get sufficient signal to support CCTV devicies which are bolted to the outside of the house.
Given I use the digital voice option from BT via the SH2 I was thinking that a Mesh system would be a better option providing seamless connectivity throughout the house and hopefully be able to provide sufficient signal to operate the cameras too.
Id like to keep the TV's and PC's hardwired through the switch to the SH2 to ensure the best possible connection.
Any suggestions as to Mesh system to get, how many devices to support this and the best to configure please? Im not hugely technical and have managed by luck more than judgement to get this far.
Im assuming I can get a plug and play system which is compatible with the SH2 and have seen TP link mentioned.
As always, any advice will be greatly received.
Thanks.
You can either go the full mega route and setup a Unifi WIFI network which takes a little more work upfront but will benefit in the long run and is far and away one of the best consumer solutions out there, but youre gonna have to teach yourself a bunch of stuff first and get some prerequisite equipment........ OR probably more suitable something like the DECO range from TP Link, super easy to setup, Master DECO plugs into your SH2 via Ethernet and the rest can either connect to each other via WIFI or Ethernet, the latter preferable always and you already have those links available it seems. You'll have a singular WIFI network and you can turn off the WIFI on the SH2.
Also ive noticed that some of the GURU's on these forums have DECO experience so youll be in good hands.
Its not so much what is Best performance wise, youll need a mix of user friendly and performance, I think DECO does that, my friends all use them.
A few things to try!
If your house has partition walls, then you may well have too much WiFi already. With cabled back haul, probably one WiFi point per floor, with them at different places in the floor plan (ie not stacked) may be enough - possibly with the extra router in AP mode where you need some extra ethernet ports. With the AP router and WiFi extenders, you should be able to set these on different channels per node, and don't be afraid to use 40MHz bandwidth. Do that and you can usually use the same SSID and password for all the nodes.
You can try this with your existing equipment - before you go spend any more!
Thanks everyone for your help and suggestions.
I'll work through what you suggest Crimliar and see how it goes. Failing that it'll be the TP link Mesh i think.
But thanks again and I'll be sure to post back on here what I find!