Mesh Wifi - question

[smilodon]

I'm wondering if the following set up is possible with a Mesh WI-Fi system. this is probably a terrible explanation but here goes........

1. Main Mesh router in living room connected to Fibre Modem. The existing Wi-Fi router gives decent Wi-Fi across almost all the house.

2. 2nd Mesh unit connected to the 1st unit via  Wi-Fi back-haul. It's not possible to connect these two units with Cat cable so it has to be Wi-Fi. The Wi-Fi signal in the kitchen is decent so there should be no problem connecting the two units this way.

3. 3rd unit in an annex cottage. This unit can be hard wired into the 2nd unit as I can run Cat 6 between them, but it cannot receive a Wi-Fi signal from either of the other Mesh units as the walls are too thick.

4. The 3rd unit provides Wi-Fi connectivity around the cottage.


That's -     Main router in living room -----------Wi-Fi (cannot run Cat 6) ------------- 2nd unit in kitchen------------Cat6 (cannot receive Wi-Fi signal) --------------3rd unit in cottage.

I know Mesh systems can connect to each other either through a 3rd Wi-Fi channel or Cat cable but I am not sure if they can do a combination of both?

Anyone have any expertise with Mesh systems or achieved what I'm trying to do?

Cheers in advance.

[albert]

I might be wrong for your specific systems, but with mine, units 2 and 3 must be within a certain number of metre's of unit 1. They cannot be linked in a line but more in a hub and spoke setup. My 3 unit mesh systems has a recommendation of 10m between 2/3 and the wire connect unit number 1.

A wifi repeater is possibly what you need to link the 2 buildings with the fastest speed possible and effectively extend the mesh to the cottage and place a further unit there.

That's - Main router in living room -----------Wi-Fi (cannot run Cat 6) ------------- 2nd unit in kitchen


Main router ------------Cat6 --------- Wifi repeater A end------(line of sight) ---------Wifi repeater B end -------Cat 6 -------3rd unit in cottage.

It's not really a mesh at this point as mesh is designed to automatially link all mesh wifi points automatically. You need a bit more pro-like design for this. Wifi repeaters could be replaced by shielded Cat 6 in a small run of plastic conduit tubing a foot underground. That would be my approach, as repeaters are not cheap and not as reliable as cable.

[smilodon]

Cheers, Yep I am tending towards biting the bullet and getting CAT 6 piped from the lounge to the kitchen and across to the cottage in one hop. The house is made from stone so chasing walls isn't really an option. Quite a bit of existing cabling already sits in surface trunking. I was hoping to avoid adding any-more but robust Wi-Fi in the cottage is the priority.

[Penfold]

I use AMPLIFI and it daisy chains  does the help?

[albert]

robust Wi-Fi in the cottage is the priority.

It's certainly 100% the reason we avoid certain holiday cottages, if there is a whiff of crappy wifi in the reviews, out it goes. A decent legth of STP CAT6 cable is pretty cheap (£30 for 50m), likewise so is a 2cm roll of tubing. There will always be cabling entry points into and out of a property (even drains if the tubing is kept dry during install) and if you carefully check this, as you say you might find there is already space for another cable in the existing space.  

The STP Shielded cable will live perfectly well along side the power cables and will not get enough interference to notice any loss.

Also because you have the mesh box in the cottage, the customer phone will connect at 100s maybe even over 1000Mbps and that will look great, then you give them a clean and reliable connection back to the main router with the cable and they are happy.

Ubiquity AMPLIFI  I admit looks awesome, but price to performance and if you need it to work during bad weather, lightening etc. shielded cable always wins.

[smilodon]

I've an electrician coming to do a load of work in a few weeks. I'll get him to sort a couple of cables out.

The Amplifi Alien units look amazing but are indeed a bit pricy. Still who knows I might succumb  

Cheers

[smite]

Not sure if you have figured it out, but does this help?
The frequently asked questions below sounded like your scenario.
https://www.tp-link.com/us/support/faq/1794/

[smilodon]

Cheers! Q2 does seem to suggest with TP Link at least it's possible. I'll still try for wired ethernet from the main unit into the cottage, but that's good to know.

[smite]

A year and half in and these Deco M4's haven't gone down once.
Worth a try..

[Benny]

Firstly hurry up and get it rentable. I still need photography lessons.

Secondly I run Deco's and they are bullet proof for me, but that probably doesn't help.
Thirdly, I also run (*spit) powerline adaptors to the outdoor house and they work for my work load (teams, video call etc). They need resetting once every year or so but generally rock solid.

[TeaLeaf]

Big fan of ubiquity stuff for mesh, but also because of the ability to run so much other stuff from the same controller, Inc your security cameras.  Check out their controller and mesh stuff, asking with other options for those pesky inner building gaps.

[A Twig]

I've used Velop Linksys Tri-band for the last 3 years. Each node can be connected with cable (to another node or back to the main router) or over wifi, and it's been brilliant, in our last place we had 18 inch thick stone walls, and still had 100% wifi all round the house - so yes in short their system will do what you ask.

We run ours in bridge mode so any wired devices plugged straight into our Homehub (spit) like printers, NAS etc can be "seen" by all the wifi devices.

[smilodon]

Back to this again.

The Cat 6 cable is being installed next week and so I need to decide on a Mesh system. All the suggestions are much appreciated thanks.

My outstanding issue is that I need a Mesh router with at least four LAN ports and the Mesh repeaters need at least one LAN port each.

Currently my Openreach fibre modem connects into LAN port one on the Fritzbox router provided by Zen Internet. Using the WAN port doesn't work and I assume this is the same for any other router?

LAN port two connects straight into my 4K TV
LAN port three runs a CAT 6 cable into my little office and into my Desktop
LAN port four will run via CAT 6 into the cottage to provide Internet there.

The plan is to put a Mesh extender onto the end of each CAT 6 cable, hence the need for a LAN port on each unit and cable the two Mesh units and Tv into the Mesh Router.

Ubiquity Amplifi units don't seem to have any LAN ports on the Mesh units so they cannot be hardwired into the router.
Most other Mesh routers only seem to have two LAN ports such as the TP Link Deco's, the Linksys Velop has three. However I think I need four to set things up as I need them.

I don't know much about switches but would that be an option to use with a Mesh Router that only has two or three usable LAN ports?

Any help for a network dunce would be much appreciated. Thanks.

Copy of scribble for electrician.[ATTACH=CONFIG]5957[/ATTACH]

[A Twig]

If you run the mesh network in Bridge mode like wot I dun, then you could plug your telly into the fritzbox router, and that would leave you enough slots for your other runs? Basically, any standalone devices that need a hard connection go straight into the fritzbox.

Ours had 4 LAN ports, so work docking station and wifi mesh router plugged into LAN 1 and LAN 2 on the fritzbox. Most of the linksys nodes then mesh happily wirelessly off that one, with things like my non-wifi NAS plugged into a node in my wife's office for e.g.

Where we had a blackspot (one wifi node too far away to mesh properly with the rest of the house, which matches your use case) I ran CAT 6 from the mesh router to that linksys node, so that "leg" of the mesh is actually hardwired, rather than wifi. I'll try a picture in a sec.

[A Twig]

Can't seem to attach an image properly - so here we go its a PNG file of a crappy scribble in powerpoint:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1m9bi3qgqSdnlP8lKAyidYLvPUeXi-CCZ/view?usp=sharing

Green lines are Cat 6 connections, blue lines are meshy wifi goodness and everything can see everything, so I can stream films from my NAS to my TV.