Linksys - Velop MX4200 WiFi 6 Whole Home Mesh System

I got a 3 mesh system Linksys MX4200 used for $25 and it works great covers my house in WiFi for the cameras and cellphones and gives me full 950mbps wired connection to my computers.

I’ve got Linksys AX4200 set up in two homes. Three nodes in each. Default setup except for changing the SSID and password. Absolutely rock solid. I reboot them quarterly as a preventative measure for good overall network health, but they’re otherwise maintenance free. I never have the issues people come here complaining about with automations not running, HomePods not working, audio lag, devices going no response, etc. Literally plugged them in, changed the SSID and password, turned on HomeKit Secure Router, and that’s been it. Would recommend them a thousand times over others. A lot of people on this sub will recommend Ubiquiti because it’s “enterprise grade”. A lot of people on this sub with “enterprise grade” networking gear also come to complain that none of their shit works properly. That all said, no network is going to support 100+ wifi devices very nicely. Hubbed devices with the hubs hardwired into your mesh nodes are going to give you the best, most reliable results for smart home devices. EDIT: Ubiquiti fanboys and armchair network admins are big mad about my recommendation.

Tough call, mostly because you need fast ports, namely the wan, so you aren't limited to 960Mbps as you would be using a gigabit wan port. Gl.inet flint2 or the openwrt one has 2.5 wan, and is fully supported. And not that it really matters, but dd-wrt does support some WiFi 6 models. Linksys mx4200 v1 and 2, mx4300, mr7350, mr7500, mx8500, Asus rt-ax89x I'm not sure how well all those models perform with dd-wrt, as I don't have those units. dd-wrt mainly won't be supporting broadcom WiFi 6 based units. Probably because the drivers. I use an mx4200 with openwrt (AgustinLorenzo nss enabled build) and it suits my needs just fine, but I only have a 300Mbps connection.

I bought one of the popular linksys AX4200 kits, as well a couple of the LN1301 units and played around with the mesh setup and it was just trash. And those claim to be tri band. So my question is this, is mesh only worth it if you CAN do you a wired backhaul? I can't really do that in my current place and when I do move I'm just going to skip to a unifi setup.

Look at Linksys mesh. Couple of months ago I picked up two Velop wifi 6 nodes on Woot for $20 each.

In 220 sqm, you shouldn't need more than 3 nodes, unless you want more coverage outside, but with too many as you've already experience, they will sometime fight for the best signal, even more so when they are just wifi based. If you can get more Cat6 installed, the location of the router (primary node) becomes irrelevant since they will all share the same exact signal with the same bandwidth so you should be able to test it now and confirm better coverage. If you have baseboards, they make 1/4 round that has channels in them where you can hide the Cat 6, and if that's not an option there are some manufacturers who make flat cables. As for me personally, both system have been challenging but that is more related to my own person situation than the hardware. The Linksys Velop system started out great, but as my need for IoT devices grew, the system struggled a bit. I came to find out well after the fact, the nodes which I thought I set up as wired, someone defaulted back to wireless which impact my bandwidth for devices connected to it. I ended up giving them to my inlaws since the coverage at their home sucked and they have been working perfectly since. I moved over to the Night Hawk system on the recommendation of a friend who has their gaming router and overall it has been really good. It took a lot of additional setup and tweaking to get it up and running at full capacity. The biggest challenge I had (again my own issue, not product issue), was I forgot how many of my IoT devices only run off 2.4 gHz. The Night Hawk system (unlike the Velop) has a default SSID that combines the 2.4 and 5 gHz bands. The Velop had these automatically separate with different SSID's. Due to this, some of my IoT devices had trouble connecting and I regularly lost their signal. (see Ring Cameras, smart switches/outlets, etc) so this meant I had to reconfigure my network with customized networks. But on the Nighthawk system this works differently than I was used to. The main 2.4/5 ghz network will always remain, so I had to create a custom standalone 2.4ghz network and then reconnect all my IoT devices to that. This was a tedious effort, but again, this was my fault, not the hardware/software. Since I have finally got all of that figured out, its run flawlessly. I have a 1GB fiber line. If the device is hardwired, I will get 850 Mbps (up and down) on average (www.speedtest.net). On a wireless device it will vary from 100Mbps to 500Mbps which is dependent on how much bandwidth is being used at any give time. The coverage is better than the Velop overall. I have a few friends who have the Orbi systems and swear by them. Since I run a lot of wired, I wanted some more raw high performance in certain locations. (Night Hawk lets you prioritize devices better IMO) I both game and run a home theater server so I stream not only from the net, but also across the network from that service to 4 different locations in the house. Even if they are all running at the same time, the wired connection means they don't bog down and don't impact the wireless bandwidth that is remaining. The Orbi overperforms with wifi only based stuff and provides a stable network across a larger area. From what I understand the setup is also easier on the Orbi. If and when my night hawk system dies, I will seriously consider and Orbi system but thats not going to be for quite a long time.

I ditched my Linksys Velop system for a Unifi Express 7 & Unifi U6 Pro. Much happier with the Unifi system over the Linksys.

I've been using a Linksys Velop Mesh system for the last 6 years. We put our Virgin Media router into modem mode and run everything through the Linksys kit. I was actually thinking the other day that it's getting on a bit but fibre connection is 250Mb and the Wi-Fi delivers that on [speedtest.net](http://speedtest.net) across our flat. (I don't know what the walls are made of but signal was terrible in some parts of the flat without the extra nodes.) We also ran ethernet to each room when we had the place rewired, so the Wi-Fi nodes in each room are hardwired. Works well. I do worry it's getting on, so will check out some of the other recommendations in this thread!

I get by right now with some Linksys Velop. You can find some used for $20-$40 a node. They are easy to set up and very stable if done right.

I had a TP-Link BE85 setup before this and returned it because of constant disconnects which is a known issue with them. I felt like their speeds were higher than Eero but the disconnects and the complexity of three separate SSID’s versus a single one made Eero a better choice. Prior to that, I owned an AMPLIFI Alien setup that I really liked. One of my units started having issues and needed replaced after several years. AMPLIFI has decided not to continue supporting the Alien product anymore so that was stuck on WiFi 6. Before the AMPLIFI setup I owned a Linksys Velop system and it was absolute trash. I don’t think there is a such thing as a perfect mesh system because if there was I would have bought it. That being said, I am sharing the same frustrations as you with the recent firmware updates.