Router/Mesh Network Recommendation

This is a post I should have made during the first week of lockdown instead of the 13th, but better late than never.

We live in a 2 bedroom apartment (1,300 sq ft). High-rise with a lot of wifi activity. I am on a 5+ year old dual band Netgear router. Secondary TVs in bedrooms have hardwired Ethernet connections, but we use laptops, phones, etc. there so wifi reliability and speed are important. Spectrum is my ISP and I am supposed to be getting up to 200 Mbps. Speedtest typically shows around 80-85 Mbps in living room directly in front of router, 60-65 in master next door and 55-50 Mbps in my son’s room at the back furthest away from router. He complains about dropouts during school Zoom lessons and More importantly to him IPad (YouTube and Fortnite). Personally, I have been fine with things but I am being nagged to get a more reliable setup and we are probably overdue.

I started looking into mesh networks (e.g., eero) but was also wondering given the small size of our place if a new and improved router alone might be sufficient to improve performance.

If I do something like eero then I need to add a switch to our entertainment cabinet because we have a ton of Ethernet connections. I would almost prefer something like Orbi which has multiple Ethernet ports. But even then I might still need a switch. Currently I have four Ethernet ports in use but have two other devices that I am using wirelessly (PS4 and Sonos) that ideally would be hardwired to my router as well.

So, I would prefer to have something with a lot of ports to avoid additional devices taking up cabinet space, but ultimately want whatever makes sense and will give us best combination of coverage and speed.

Appreciate recommendations.

 

Google's wifi, now branded as Nest, i believe, has been solid for us. If you have Ethernet to other areas of the house you can wire the nodes in, and get better speeds throughout your place.

 

The Google WiFi and Google Nest WiFi are both mesh systems, with multiple wireless access points, but one isn't a rebrand of the other.

The Nest system has better radios and has the Google Assistant (which you can enable or not) in each of the remote points. The older Google WiFi doesn't have smart-speaker functionality, but it does have two Ethernet ports in each remote point, so you can add Ethernet-only devices to your network without having to run cable all the way back to the central router.

You'll need a switch with either system, because the routers have only one WAN and one LAN port.

 

Newer mid to high end ASUS routers can be teamed up to create a mesh network. I suspect that a single would be good enough for your living space. But if not, you can pick up another an pair them into a mesh. I'm in an old thick-walled large house that was difficult to cover with with conventional wifi. It's current setup has 3 routers (one main plus 2 satellites) that cover the whole house and out into a large yard. Setup and maintenance of this network have been easy. Coverage is seamless and operation has been reliable for over a year.

 

I had problems with dual-band routers in our townhouse, and I ended up getting a three pack of first-get Eero. It's worked pretty much flawlessly since we got it. I finally have our promised speed throughout the house. However, they only have two ethernet ports per Eero. (The first gens can be had cheap on Ebay now, FWIW.)

 

Recently reworked my lab infrastructure. Replaced Negear routers and WAP with Ubiquiti:

several Unifi Ap-Ac WAP
multiple US-8-60W POE switches
several other GB EN switches

There was a learning curve but the rewards have more than been worth it. Network statistics, problem tracking have all be excellent. Improvement in network speed was quite noticeable.

 

Like @atomicbob I'm a fan of Ubiquiti. In my previous house I had their UniFi AC. When I moved last summer, I started using their AmpliFi consumer line for WiFi, which has very easy mesh setup, and I'm very happy with it. (I have it bridged to an Ubiquiti EdgeRouter that drives my wired home network, but that is not relevant in your case.) The AmpliFi base station has just one Ethernet out, though, you'd have to get a dumb switch as well (something like a Netgear GS105).

 

We went with Netgear Orbi and one year in I’m super happy. 240 square meter house, two floors. Never had any issues. Fiber into house and then WAN to the Orbi . Using wired connection for my office but rest of house is on WiFi.

 

A "better" wireless router will still be bound by the laws of physics and the FCC. If you're having reliability problems, you'd be more likely to solve them by switching to a mesh system.

There's a good comparative review here: https://www.androidcentral.com/goog...o-vs-amplifi-which-mesh-system-should-you-buy

That's mine as well, along with a real router and firewall. I'm done with consumer and SOHO gear.

But my home network is absurd: multi-WAN, multiple VPN clients, VPN server with 2FA, 9 VLANs, etc. For someone who just wants an easy, reliable connection and maybe a guest network or parental controls, the hardware I chose would be wildly inappropriate.

 

ubiquiti dreammachine might be your best option. with extenders as needed.

 

But the photo shows 4 Ethernet ports? BTW, it's been discounted to $150.
https://store.amplifi.com/products/amplifi-hd-mesh-router

 

Duh, I was writing from my backyard with my morning espresso and did not go inside to check it. You are totally right, I just forgot because I have so much gear in that room that I needed a couple of Netgear switches as well Anyway, it's a great gadget IMHO.

 

I ended up buying the ASUS ZenWiFi Mini WiFi 6 mesh system with one router and two other nodes. I probably would have bought the regular ZenWiFi AX but nobody has it in stock now and I thought I might be better off with the cheaper set that has an extra node to give me some flexibility regarding placement. And Best Buy had it in stock locally.

So far, WiFi has improved with a much more reliable connection throughout the apartment and I am also generally getting close to the max speed of 200 mbps from Spectrum in most locations. However, my wired LAN connections have not seen improved throughput, no better than on my 8 year old Netgear router that was replaced, which would max out at 100 mbps for either WiFi or wired. I did notice on my switch that for the three LAN connections to my Samsung TVs the light was orange and not green. My understanding is that green means gigabit and orange means 100 mbps speeds. I suspect this may be a limitation on the Samsung TVs themselves. Does anyone know if they can only take up to 100 mbps. That might be the bottleneck there. As a practical matter, I am not sure why those TVs would even need a faster connection as they have been pretty rock solid with the wired LAN connection even with the old router. However, if this is a settings and not hardware issue I would of course want to maximize throughput for those.

For my LAN connection to my PS4, the switch is blinking green though, but when I check the internet speed on my PS4 it is only around 65 mbps. This is one device I would actually want to max out download speeds on as downloading games/updates can take a while and any speed improvement would be helpful. I feel like I should be getting better speeds there but don’t know what to do differently. I don’t see any bandwidth limiting in the settings in the ASUS app or web interface although admittedly I don’t understand this stuff very well. Any tips are appreciated.

 

If you are using your old ethernet cables, they may be CAT5, which are capped at 100 mbps. Any cable that is CAT5e and above should be able to handle faster speeds.

 

I checked to make sure I am using Cat 6 cables. I am now getting max speeds for the PS4 which is blinking green on my switch. The three Cat 6 cables for the TVs are blinking orange in their ports and maxing at 100 mbps. I suspect that the Samsung TVs are capped at 100 mbps and that is where bottleneck is. Again, I cannot think of a situation where I need faster speeds to my TV but was curious as to what was going on.

 

I'll throw in my two cents here as well. My background is in network engineering, so I'll try to keep this as non-technical as possible. Most commercial consumer grade mesh systems are decent but ultimately have cheap radios which limit their ability to work through walls and in tough environments with lots of signal interference. If you really want amazing Wi-Fi, it behooves you to look into enterprise grade equipment.

Having spent most of my career managing, troubleshooting and configuring gear from a variety of big players like Cisco, Aruba, aerohive, as well as Meraki and ubiquiti, my personal Wi-Fi setup at home is based on ruckus access points. Ruckus makes a very cost-effective enterprise-grade AP with a kick-ass radio. Even one ruckus access point will out perform many mesh systems. You can also run them in mesh quite easily by following a simple YouTube tutorial. They can be purchased on Amazon for a premium over consumer grade gear but I personally feel it's worth it.

What this gets for me is 250mbps+ anywhere on my property, using only 2 R550 access points. compared to what many of us spend on our audio setups, this is peanuts for the quality of life improvements it brings

 

I just discovered this. I moved my router to a more central location closer to the hallway, and needed a slightly longer ethernet cable. I swapped the 3 ft cable for a 10 ft cable that I had lying around. I didn't think it should matter for a short distance, but it was a CAT5 cable and the speed dropped from 900 to 95 Mbps. I bought a CAT6 cable and the speed went back up to 900.

 

I was never a networking engineer (brought in a guy who was, when needed) but as a small/medium-office jack-of-all-trades systems manager, had to spend time under, as well as at, desks and was able to install, configure and administer almost everything day to day.

Several years after I retired, I read the Blue Jeans article Is Your Cat 6 Cable A Dog? It was an absolute eye opener to me, especially as I had tended to buy cheap (flyleads; building-installed cable was not skimped on). Thing is (hello audiophools, hello Audioquest) that ethernet is such an incredibly robust system that one has to work quite hard at screwing it up. A slight slowdown here and there mostly goes unnoticed. @SineDave, would I be right in saying that even ancient 10Mb networking would be more than enough for just audio?

However bad my office cable might have been, they were more than good enough. But if I had had the Blue-Jeans article back then, I would certainly have stuck to Belden or similar.

 

I'll offer this data point. My lab is configured for Dante digital delivery, 88KHz, 24bit, multi-channel throughout. Running a 2-channel stream results in approximately 19.3 Mbit/s. If configured for 44KHz 16bit it would be on the ragged edge with little margin using a 10MBit/s ethernet system.

 

The issue with networks as it pertains to audio are split into two areas - bandwidth and reliability.

From a bandwidth perspective, streaming FLAC/WAV to a Roon endpoint would work on a 10 megabit network with significant buffering, but due to overhead and negotiation, a100 megabit would be superior and optimal.

What the BJC article alludes to is the tendency for low quality connections (poor/old CAT cable, poorly crimped/terminated) to induce jitter and packet loss. Packets are basically the little chunks of data a given file/request is chopped into by network gear to transmit it over a wire.

Most of the network traffic we use in audio relies on a protocol called TCP which is able to request a source device re-transmit lost or corrupted packets after doing error correction. This means that even if you have a somewhat compromised physical network, audio should not be affected in any way since the device is doing a checksum to request any missing/bad packets be re-sent. This would manifest as a lengthy buffering process but would have no audible impact since the packets are reconstituted into the original audio stream on the endpoint (Raspberry Pi/SoTM/PC etc).

I tend to recommend most folks use CAT6 and go for a gigabit network for performance reasons (this way you can stream video on your network too), but the idea that LAN cabling affects audio quality is laughable at best, unless referring to a UDP based streaming technology.

Many older web based streams are UDP based, since the lack of error correction makes the overhead lower and performance better on slow connections (assuming moderate to minimal packet loss). Nowadays most players like Netflix, Tidal, Qobuz etc all use TCP and simply buffer a few seconds of content at the front end to ensure bit-perfect playback.