More low end mesh wifi units or fewer higher spec units

[mrochester]

Hi all.

Because I'm a nerd I always take my spare mesh wifi units away on holiday with me when staying somewhere with internet access included. I mostly always stay in old houses with great big thick stone walls and I have sometimes found with my 3 Tenda Nova MW3 units that I still can't blanket the entire property in good quality wifi coverage.

Does anyone know if, broadly speaking, it would be better to get more of the MW3s to add additional nodes or would it be better to invest in a new higher spec system?

With regards to mesh wifi, do all nodes need to have a direct connection to the node that is connected to the router or can they hop over other nodes to get there?

Many thanks.

M.

 

[WJA96]

If what you have works OK then get more of that. You can either get a signal through a wall or you can't. How the nodes connect and backhaul is system specific. From a very quick look at the Tenda MW3 it looks to be a 2x2 wireless backhaul and you don't need direct communication with the wired backhaul 'master' node to make it work, but every time you have a secondary hop you will lose half the bandwidth because that's how WLAN works.

A 'better' system might have 4x4 wireless backhaul so faster across multiple wireless backhaul links but that won't help your signal through a wall problem.