Review: Linksys Velop mesh networking kit delivers strong Wi-Fi despite setup quirks

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  • Reply 61 of 62
    melgrossmelgross Posts: 33,510member
    gatorguy said:
    melgross said:
    gatorguy said:
    melgross said:
    melgross said:
    melgross said:
    The truth is that almost everything in that article is irrelevant. What matters is how your network is working for you. As long as there is a good enough signal, Apple's routers, set up as extenders, will give you a very large percentage of the full network signal, often out performing almost any mesh network I've seen reviewed anywhere.
    Hey, that's great. And for those of us for whom such a strategy is NOT working out well? Reviews of available alternatives are very welcome indeed. So far AI reviews have twice saved me buying a WiFi system that would probably disappoint me.
    There is no one solution. If you read articles, and reviews elsewhere, you will see that for many installations, one top line router, placed well, often is a better solution than a mash. But situations vary. I’ve been doing this for a pretty long time. In my house, which is horrible, and worse than most others, I’ve gotten it to work very well. You don’t need what I’ve done everywhere.

    for some people, a mesh is great. For others, it will suck.

    i find that most people have their router in a very bad place, but it’s the only easy place they can put it. So it doesn’t work well for them. For many of then, extenders will work well. For some others, it won’t.

    all I’ve been saying is that I’m reading, here and there, though not everywhere, that mesh is IT. It’s the way to go. That’s not always true, and present mesh solutions tend to be slow, though reliable.
    Most routers are placed by the cable the cable company installer.  He only cares that your TV works and he gets on to his next install.

    In any large house or one with traditional plaster walls, the best placement is going to be a central location to avoid peripheral dead spots.   But that means running cable through walls.  They hate doing that -- so most routers are on an outside wall...
    It’s really a complicated situation. Many newer houses were, for a time, pretty open plan. Signals had no major obstructions.

    but have a house like mine, with a second floor, and there are major problems. Even using my signal strength meter, it’s hard to find good locations.

    so sometimes, because of a complex network, the gateway needs to be placed at a good point for the wired network, that ends up being in a bad spot for the WiFi network.
    Well I took a gamble on doing a two-point mesh on Saturday and came out impressed. A bit of trial and error to set up the best spot for the second wifi spot, tho the mobile setup app made it too darn easy. This stuff is supposed to be hard, right?

    I've got roughly 108mb/s internet service coming in according to testing.  I'm now hitting 30-50MB/sec in the summer house for the past couple of days, sustained 100MB plus even on the patio/porch which had typically been iffy at times. Workshop still a bit problematic tho, only 17-25 there but still (barely) useable. If I were to add a third point I'd probably be golden. I rarely use my phone there anyway for anything other than background music so I probably won't bother. I'd tried repeaters/extenders before in various places in the house with nowhere near those results.

    For less than a $250 investment I'm happy enough for now. 
    I don’t know what your service plan has in speed, but my FIOS plan is near Gb/s. I get about 400 - 500Mb/s most everywhere for WiFi. Obviously, I receive the full speeds for wired Ethernet. So it depends on your requirements. If your speeds are low, you may never notice the poorer performance of whatever WiFi setup you might have. That’s speaking in general.

    i’d be willing to pay more to get those WiFi speeds up to the 866Mb/s our iPhones and iPads can manage, but that doesn’t seem to be possible right now.
    My service is quoted as being 100Mbps, tested throughput is closer to 110Mbps. So considering the distance separating the summer house from the main structure I'm fairly impressed. With even 15Mbps sufficient for simultaneous TV viewing while playing on a smartphone or two I'm good with it. 

    You've got wonderful service there Mel with the best available to me being 300Mbps. But I can't see any potential personal use case that makes the expense worthwhile. 
    Well, then you’re getting excellent speeds from the network. The difference between the 150/150 I was getting from FIOS and the new 940/880 (which strangely enough is consistently 910/940) in price, is $30 a month. We get the full package of of Tv, internet and Phones, and we use Verizon Wireless as well. So we get an overall discount. Adding $30 more a month was a no brainer. I do find it useful. I work on some shared projects involving video editing for documentaries. It’s freebee stuff. You know how these projects are. Anyway, the files are often GBs in size. Also, my daughter is in the photo/publishing industry, and works on her projects at home often. Those files are big as well.

    Both of us move our files between our Macs and our iPads. Depends on what we’re doing with them.

    even downloading some games for my ipad requires GBs of bytes. I’m amazed at how big these things are getting. I just got a game that’s 1.4GB in size. I’m not a big game player, but I like to follow what’s doing in the industry. I’ve got almost 700 apps on my iPad Pro 12.9”, and often, I can see 25 updates at once, amounting to over 10GB of data!. Who would ever have thought that would happen?

    anyway, having this high speed allows everything to work smoothly.
    edited July 2017
  • Reply 62 of 62
    You wrote: At the primary node, connect the modem to one port on Velop, and connect the switch to the second port of Velop. My friend was attempting to connect modem -> switch -> Velop, and DHCP assignment from Modem to Velop doesn't work like this.

    So, I have a cable modem, Directv, and ADT to plug in. When I had my Nighthawk, there were plenty of ports for me to plug these in. Not so with Velop. So I bought a switch. But I plugged it in like your friend did. My Directv and the switch are connected to the node, and the modem and node are connected to the switch. It seems to be working like that. Should I switch it? 
    I still can't figure out how to connect my Gateway ADT tower (which gives us remote access to setting our alarm and seeing our home cam) because when I plug it in to the switch, it doesn't work. It lights up orange instead of green on switch and I get a message that I'm offline when I go to ADT site or app. 

    I've called both ADT and Linksys and neither can help me. Do you think there is a switch out there that could work?
    Thank you!

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