TP-Link - Deco X5000

Now is the time - there are good black Friday sales on at the moment. Would get either the TP Link Deco 3 pack recommended below, or a 3 pack Eero. The deco's will be cheaper but will be fine.

Wifi boosters are a waste of time in my opinion. Mesh Wifi on the other hand can work very well. A great trick is to use the mesh stations as "ethernet extenders". I recommend a 3 unit mesh system for your house. Put one beside the modem and plug directly into the modem. Put one behind your TV and use an ethernet cable to connect your console (and possibly your TV) to the mesh unit. Put the third unit upstairs in a central location or in an office/study room if you have one. You need to disable the wifi signal coming from your modem to avoid wifi conflicts. If you have Sky internet and Sky TV this can be tricky to do because Sky TV force enables Sky wifi. There are work arounds such as making sure the Sky TV box is connected with ethernet rather than with wifi. I have used TP Link Deco mesh for years and find them excellent. Others recommend Asus. A wifi 5 system is cheap and good for 300MBs or so wifi speeds. I currently have a three unit wifi 6+ system and we are getting 700MBs+ wifi speeds and over 900MBs on devices plugged directly into the mesh units. I assume Wifi 7 is even better but it costs more. Just try to make sure you get a tri band mesh system so that you can use all three wifi bands (2.5, 5 and 6 GHz.)

This is exactly the set I have. Works great in. Two storey House.

First off, sorry to hear about the lightning strike — that’s rough, glad at least two units survived. Mixing in Wi-Fi 6E/7 with your existing Wi-Fi 6 Decos won’t really unlock their full potential, since the mesh will still lean on the lowest standard. Unless you plan to replace the whole setup, you won’t see a big jump. If your two current units are still covering fine, the safest move is just adding another Wi-Fi 6 Deco to keep everything consistent. Wi-Fi 7 is great long-term (throughput, latency, efficiency), but right now it’s only worth it if you’re going all-in or already have a bunch of 6E/7 client devices. As for the AX-50 Outdoor — it’s solid for extending coverage outside (yard, patio, garage). It’s basically just a weatherproof Deco, so don’t expect crazy speed boosts compared to indoor nodes, but range is quite decent.

To be fair, if you don't have any WI-FI 7 devices, it's not really necessary (IMHO...), plus, as someone else mentioned, having that dedicated back-haul comes in clutch for mesh networks, going from the original google home hubs to a linksys WH02 system (example, not a recommendation) greatly increased our speeds on anything connected to a node (as long as it was only one hop, there's one way in the back that's two hops, but it's still pretty fast). We actually have the (a) WI-FI 6 deco system now with Gig internet, and we get excellent speeds throughout the house and yard (again, as long as it's only one hop). To answer your question, sorta, tri-band helps enormously, to use an analogy... dual band mesh is like you (your cell phone on wifi say...) trying to make a phone call to your mom (the mesh node), who's on the phone with your brother (the main node/AP), everything you say has to go through your mom to get to your bother, and then back to you, because she can only listen or talk at one time, also she's in a loud shopping mall. With tri band, your mom just holds the phone up to the other phone so you can talk to your brother directly, there's still some overhead and noise (she walked into a hallway or something now), but the information gets through a lot faster. eta: idk a simple walkie talkie VS phone call analogy may have worked better...

Plus one here for Deco. I have four WiFi 6 models. Mesh is a better solution I agree. WiFi 7 models are still very expensive but few devices are compatible at the moment so for me WiFi 6 is the best option for the money.

Your problem is simple. The router Spectrum gave you is weak, and it is sitting too far from your room. You do not need Ethernet in every room, and you do not need to touch the coax ports at all. Ignore the video you saw. You also do not want a “wifi extender.” Those cut your speed in half because they repeat the signal instead of creating a real network. Here is the easy path: 1. Buy a two pack mesh system. One unit replaces the Spectrum router and plugs into the Spectrum modem with the same cable the old router used. The second unit goes in the hallway or living room halfway between the modem and your bedroom. You only need power for the second unit. No coax. No Ethernet. 2. Set them up using the app that comes with the system. It takes five minutes. The mesh units talk to each other wirelessly and create one strong network. Your bedroom will get full signal because the second unit is right down the hall instead of across the whole house. 3. For brands, eero 6 or TP-Link Deco 6 are fine. They cost about 100 to 150 dollars for a two or three pack. Put it on your Christmas list. Either one will be miles better than what Spectrum gave you. 4. Do not overthink MoCA or powerline. They work in some houses and fail in others. Mesh is the least headache and works in almost every small house. If you do those steps your PS5 will stay online and you can stop fighting with the signal.

I replaced an older Netgear Orbi system a few years ago with a TP-Link Deco to get WiFi 6 and outdoor APs. It worked great for a few years and then because extremely unreliable. We switched about 6 months ago to a Firewalla AP7 WiFi system powered by a Firewalla Gold SE. I absolutely love the performance and reliability but it was the robust security is what drove the decision. Ubiquity was the other option we considered. They’re very compelling but we already had the Firewalla Gold SE router.

I switched from eero to TP deco and I like it more. Assigning 2.4 for IoT stuff is a great improvement. At one stage I was literally walking 100 feet outside to make my phone get to 2.4 because the eero cannot manually switch between bands. Deco WiFi 6 is great so far as long as you’re willing to fiddle with a few settings.

I recommend TP link Deco, there is s nice user friendly app and it’s an easy setup. However as someone else wrote, mesh can be difficult on different floors without some cabeling in between floors. I have set it up at one location with an outdoor deco x50 as the main point and then 8 indoor units to cover 8 apartments in two floors and that works good, so that’s an alternative solution for you to consider.

Best thing i ever did in my home setup was scrapping Google Mesh wifi5 for a Deco wifi6 setup. Went from 5 to 2 units to cover my entire house, 160 m2 old brick stone house.

You can buy 2 unit. The main one being in the house and another garage. However, it’s hard to determine which type of connection can be used to connect the unit between the garage and the house since i’m not an expert. But if you can run ethernet from the house to the garage than you can connect the deco together via wired backhaul. The deco does have a wireless backhaul where you don’t need a cable for the two to connect but it may or may not work depending on the yard length. You could go with an outdoor unit on the yard and that would possibly be a wirless bridge between the unit in garage and unit in your house - would suggest the outdoor unit to be wired to the one in your house. That said, if you can figure that part of how to connect the deco together, i think you mean 1 gigabit internet speed instead of 1 gigabyte but if you want best performance on wifi you should go with Deco with Wifi 6E or Wifi 7. Wifi 6 is a cheaper choice but expect to get only 700-800mbps on average even in ideal condition based from my previous setup. That said it’s important that your device support wifi 6E or wifi 7 too since it’s recently introduced. Wired ethernet is also a great choice too.