EE Full Fibre - should I go Mesh or APs?

[charleshking]

I've just signed up for EE Full Fibre, so it seems a sensible time to replace my old router and APs (ASUS RT-AC5300, and two RT-AC68Us in Mesh mode, with AsusWRT Merlin firmware).

What are people using these days for reliable house-wide wifi?

I have an old town house with thick walls, and three floors.  There is some Cat5 ethernet cabling (so currently my backhaul is wired), but it's not necessarily in the best places.

I'm weighing up options:

• expensive more up-to-date Mesh, like Asus ZenWifi BT10 or Amazon Eero 7 Pro
• cheaper Mesh, like Eero 6+ or Netgear Orbi 373
• or something like GL.iNet Flint3s, as router and Access Points.

I'd like to be able to do port forwarding for things like VNC and NAS access to my storage.  IoT network for 2.4ghz devices, etc. without having to subscribe to 'premium features'. 

Any solid recommendations?

[JimM11]

@charleshking What is wrong with your current Asus mesh or are you just wanting to up your spec for the Internal networking side, AI mesh is the way to go for control, use a couple off XT8's and two RP-AX58 mixed wired/wireless backhaul and assigned devices that are fixed area wise, with a few to roam over the mesh but works great, only have a FF500 feed so Internet side is not that important. Internal you may see the difference speed wise, but all going to be what you decide the pipe to the Internet is going to be!

[charleshking]

To be honest, there's not much wrong with the current Asus Mesh kit - however it's no longer getting Asus or Merlin updates,  so will increasingly become risky.  Also, the base and two nodes struggle to cover the whole house - it's relatively old tech.

Also, also the AC-5300 is huge and looks like a dead spider.

XT8s look similar to BT10s in principle - minus the wifi 7.  I think there's now XT9s.  

Basically I'm hoping for something reliable, flexible, easy to manage, that'll quietly do its job for the next five years 🙂

[JimM11]

@charleshking Had a chuckle at the dead spider, just not a fan myself off the spiders leg's. Keep in mind the higher the spec you go the more you need, had to drop in an extra RP on the Asus AI Mesh when i retired the Sky Hub from use and popped the Main Router direct on the ONT, just all positional in my case coverage i thought was fine signal wise, but one Samsung mobile just kept falling down speed wise and it just would never recover had to do the wireless off/on to get it back up, stupid phone but it's a whatever makes it work!