eero - eero 5

Gotta say my Eero 5 has been bulletproof since buying when it first came out years ago. I was looking forward to getting past that Wi Fi 5 bottleneck and on to Wi Fi 7.

Get it from Woot.com, which is an Amazon company, so they have official refurbs. Amazon also sells official refurbs. Right now Woot has some 6 expansion nodes (not 6 pro, so no wired backhaul), and some 5 kits, I think.

That happened to me with Eero 5s but I was just able to buy one new in box on eBay for a reasonable price.

Go buy some Eero 5s off eBay or something. I got 4 for $50 a while back. Granted that was a particularly good deal, still a lot out there. I’d stay away from tplink if possible for security concerns: https://www.wired.com/story/tp-link-router-ban-investigation/

I’m a 20+ year IT professional. I’ve installed and configured enterprise networks, I’ve been in freezing network closets at 4am troubleshooting, I’ve run CAT5, CAT5e, and CAT6 through floors and walls and ceilings and attics. I thankfully now at the most just make incremental FW changes to aid the business but I still have extreme Cobbler’s Syndrome. So I bought an Eero 3 pack for less than half the needed budget for a Ubiquiti setup. It took maybe an hour and most of that was unplugging old access points and fiddling with really long and tangled network cables. It’s fast, it’s stable, it’s easy, and it’s cheaper than the prosumer solutions I looked at. If home networking is a fun hobby for someone then that person will enjoy the complex stuff. But most people just want their internet to work well and otherwise not think about it.

I've been in IT for 20ish years. I spec'd out a Ubiquiti setup. Cost was going to be way more than double the Eero 3 pack from Amazon. In a moment of clarity I realized that bc all the people on r/Ubiquiti say "I set up Eeros at my parents/brothers/friends house, it just works", I should just get some Eeros and call it good. The longest part of completely revamping my home wifi was untangling the CAT6 strewn through my basement. "it just works" is a huge selling point for people who don't want to do netops as a hobby.

My "for the Grandparents" (parents your case) recommendation for mesh is eero mesh. They go on sale very often, are dead easy to set up, offer good coverage with way more bandwidth than older people ever use, and both you and your parents can monitor and administer them using a phone App. You do not need to subscribe to any of the eero subscription services, your parents won't need them. Even the cheap eero 6 base model can give enough bandwidth to stream 4k TV everywhere if positioned right. You'll need to put the eeros in "Bridge Mode" if you want to continue to use your ISPs gateway, that too is just a button on the App.

I use and can recommend eero mesh for "non-techie" parents and grandparents. Very easy to setup, and you can administer it remotely if you have to, which isn't very often. Your parents might actually enjoy the setup process, as the phone App walks you through it completely. Eero mesh goes on sale often too. Black Friday while be here in a blink, and they are guaranteed to be on sale then. If your parents aren't gamers and aren't moving huge files regularly, even the dual band eero mesh gives good coverage at a fair price. If you can wire them in, you'll only need dual band as long as each mesh node has Ethernet ports (do not buy the "Extenders" that lack Ethernet ports if you ever envision wiring them up). If they want maximum performance using *wireless* backhaul between mesh nodes, then Tri-band eeros are what you are looking for, but they are pricey. Using mesh wirelessly is all about placement of the mesh nodes. Just keep in mind that strong 5 GHz connections between nodes is necessary for best performance. This means the nodes should be closer together than most people think. Putting units directly above or below each other is good, as well as on the same floor, but directly above or below the "dead spots" too.

It highly depends on the layout of your new apartment and the building materials used, but, generally, one unit can cover 1400 sq ft. If possible, try to find out the location where the router will be. Unless it's in the very corner, you are *probably* good with one router. If it's in the center of the home (like the center of the second floor), your chances are very good. What you can do is buy a single mesh unit, and use it as your only router and see if it's enough. If not, then you buy the second mesh unit of the same model and mesh them together. So you can do it in two stages, and stop at one if it's enough. I would advise against buying anything less than WiFi 6 (AX) if you're buying brand new. It's not really a savings with WiFi 5 if support for that unit ends years earlier than a WiFi 6, 6E, or 7 device. 6E and 7 routers are still expensive, so the value buy is WiFi 6 (AX) for now. If you want something simple to setup and manage, look into eero mesh. Just buy one unit, and then all of their other models can mesh together with it.

Since you have cable Internet and it runs into the basement, you hopefully have coaxial cables available to you throughout the house, and usually in key locations. Just look at the area where all the coax ends should meet, likely in the basement where your modem/router is at and plugged into. If you do find this bunch of coax, you can use it with MoCA Adapters to build a wired Ethernet network inside your home. If you can achieve that, then getting good WiFi everywhere will be easy, as well as providing wired capabilities for other devices in needed locations. MoCA Adapters can be a bit expensive, but worth the cost. If you can build this MoCA network, then whatever you choose as the router and Access Points will work very well, including a 3 pack of a reputable mesh brand. For mesh, I use and can recommend eero. But ASUS Zen mesh is also praised a lot, and has more configurability. If you want to go higher end, you can get an Ubiquiti Cloud Gateway router, a Ubiquiti PoE switch, and some Ubiquiti Access Points. It's more expensive, but very capable of advanced setups, and is very stable. I use Ubiquiti at another home and in my office location, and I can recommend them personally as well.

Agree, the Eero 3-pack at my house, and the 3-pack at my parent’s house works flawlessly, but we are using wired connections between all of the Eero devices instead of relying on them to link together wirelessly. Linking them wirelessly just did not work reliably for me, and the speeds were poor. I’m using old coax connections with MOCA converters to turn the old coax into Ethernet connections.

Eero with 3 points 2200 sq feet

They do make a powerline with a pass through power so you could put that on the wall and run a powerstrip after it. But IME a 3node Eero will probably perform better for you.

Buy Eero 3 pack. Easy peasy.