[Shop-talk] GOOD Wifi access point

[Karl Vacek]

Epilogue…

After trying unsuccessfully to bore a path to run a cable to the core of the house to position one strong wifi access point, I just lived with the bad wifi for a couple of months.  Then Costco offered a special on the Netgear Orbi mesh wifi system with a base and two satellites.  Not cheap at $425 for a 3-unit setup, but reviews were good overall and I bought it.  I just set it up this morning, and so far it’s great.  I have a strong wifi signal all over the house and 50 feet down the driveway, back yard, etc.

 

Being a mesh system like Mike Rambour’s Eero, it seems like it’s a pretty seamless connection when moving around the house.  The old system with a range extender confused some phones and they’d need to be reconnected to wifi when switching from the base to the extender, even though it looked like one network and wasn’t supposed to do that.

 

The Orbi suffers no loss of bandwidth to communications between the base and satellites either – they have a third dedicated channel to do that backhaul, and promise to offer Ethernet cable backhaul capability in a future firmware update.  Not sure that’s going to be necessary for me, but it’ll be an option.  For now my wifi is fast and strong wherever I need it.

 

For now it looks like I’m a happy customer.  If it turns out to be a disappointment after a month or two, Costco is good about returns.

 

Thanks to all!

Karl

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