What is the best mesh network equipment to use in a residential environment linked to a Peplink Balance with 4 WAN connections?
I’ve been using eero with my Balance 305 for years, but lately eero has had issues where the AP’s randomly go offline even though all 4 of my connections are up. It’s going to take some serious time to troubleshoot and I’m not sure it is worth the effort or if another system like Orbi is the best option to go with.
My house is 2 story 5800sqft but it has 10" thick walls with thick plaster and exterior walls are about 16" thick. To compensate for this I currently have 10 AP’s so that exterior wifi cameras work. The house is old and in hindsight I should have ran ethernet before blowing in insulation last year.
Eero is one of the best consumer wireless mesh systems for stability. You, like me, are probably using eeros in bridge mode. TP-Link DECO has a fairly good stability reputation too. However in Bridge mode many of the older DECO models have a bug:
If you want something extremely reliable, used Ruckus AP’s, Aruba Instant On (model 22 gets good reviews) and TP-Link Omada AP’s are a step above eeros.
Eeros achieve their highest reliability in Bridge mode (which I assume you have) and wired Ethernet mode (could you use MoCA for Ethernet over COAX in your house?). My wired Ethernet is also configured to run all wired devices to a switch which the gateway eero is also connected to, thus minimizing the traffic through the eeros to just WiFi devices. Something else to keep in mind is that eeros can experience problems if they are too close together.
One other step you might consider is using eero’s new WiFi Radio Metrics to see if your issues are related to WiFi signals. You would have to get a temporary eero Plus subscription and temporarily configure your eeros to be in router mode, thus having double NAT.
If you are on the older eero models (i.e., WiFi 6), I would recommend that you convert all of them to eero Pro gen 2 models. You can get those very inexpensively on ebay (3 pack for not much over $100). They are pretty much the gold standard for reliability with many believing they are the best eero ever made, although the eero Pro 6 (you want tri-band for wireless mesh) is getting a good reputation recently as eero looks like they are finally ironing out all of that generation’s issues.
Peplink apo-ax wifi 6 mimo 4x4 supports mesh and works great.
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