WiFi Mesh Systems and Connection Speeds

george4064

I'll try keep this simple to make it easy for you knowledgeable people to respond.

• Live in a 3 story terraced house, Virgin Media fibre connection (M200) and router is situated on landing in middle floor which seems the most appropriate position.

• Problem 1: Using Virgin Media router, you wouldn't get WiFi at all in most of ground floor and top floor. Speed at middle floor was as expected, (200mb Download and around 40mb Up)
• Solution 1: Installed TP-Link Deco Mesh System, main node on middle floor and router changed to modem status. Further nodes plugged in at top floor landing and bottom floor landing. This now means I have WiFi everywhere, 

• Problem 2: Connection speeds vary such that ground floor/top floor only get 1/4 speeds than what middle floor gets, c. 40mb download for upper/lower floors vs 200mb download in middle floor.
• Solution 2: ???? Was thinking of connecting the upper and lower floor nodes to the main node via Ethernet Cable? Any other ideas?

Thanks in advance.

Neil49

Correct positioning of the satellite units is essential in order that they link with as little obstruction to the signal as possible. I'm not familiar with the TP link deco app but I would hope that it would provide assistance in positioning the nodes for the best possible coverage.

Line of sight with minimal physical obstructions would be ideal but as close to achieving that as possible should be your aim.

tallmansix

Yes, the ethernet cable idea is good, even if it is a temporary cable run down the stairs just to test and eliminate the cause of the slower Wifi.

One of the issues with some wireless connected mesh systems is that each node shares the same channel and what you get is a degradation in speed when the data is sent from one node to another and then to your device.

In short, each hop to a node halves the maximum speed of the wifi.

So lets say the wifi for the whole mesh is on channel X and that is capable of 200mbps for example which is what you achieve when you connect to your primary node on the middle floor.

Now when you use a secondary node on the ground or 2nd floor, the data needs be sent on channel X to the node and then on to the device (eg phone / laptop) but all sharing that same 200 mbps maximum on channel X, so from primary node to ground floor node will get a max of 100mbps and then ground floor node to device will get max of 100mbps.

In reality your nodes should be connecting with each other at much fast speeds - the spec says 2x MIMO (867 Mbps) so should achieve say 500mbps. In theory there should be enough bandwidth to deal with the above without any slow down.

So I'd guess there are some other factors at play here and these are the things I'd check if it was my system:

1. Is the device getting 40mbps using 2.4Ghz or 5Ghz 

2. Can you connect a device to the node via ethernet and test the speed that way to understand the speed between nodes?

3. Have you got a laptop that you can install a wifi analyser on such as InSSIDer to see whether a) there is any interference from neighbours wifi on your channel and b) what the strength of the signal are in dBM?