Mesh router for vacation home

June 6, 2020

My parents are thinking of getting a mesh router for our vacation home. The thing I'm wondering about is, we usually unplug the router and power off everything when we leave the place since we're only up there a few times a year. That works fine for us now with the single router we have--when we go up to the house and plug the router in, our network shows up and we can use it without issue. But with a mesh router, we'd have to plug in the satellites as well and I'm wondering, would it work? Or would it need to be set up again when we plug it in? In other words, would the system be up and running like normal within a minute or two of plugging it in like our current single router is?

(The reason I'm asking is that they tasked me with finding a new router and I'm not really sure what to get).

zeusthemoose · June 6, 2020

I have an Orbi mesh system and at least for those, all you need to do is plug them in and wait for it to boot. I don’t know about others though.

Daemon Byte · June 7, 2020

1 hour ago, zeusthemoose said:

I have an Orbi mesh system and at least for those, all you need to do is plug them in and wait for it to boot. I don’t know about others though.

I'm looking at possibly getting one of those. Do they allow you to use 2.4ghz as the backbone? Also how many devices do you have on it? I currently have a linksys velop system and it's driving me nuts. The nodes all insist on only using 5ghz between themselves so you basically need one in every room because brick wall = signal dying and I'm not sure it's doing so well with the 30ish devices that ultimately connect to the router.

zeusthemoose · June 7, 2020

2 hours ago, Daemon Byte said:

Do they allow you to use 2.4ghz as the backbone? Also how many devices do you have on it?

I do't think so. I believe they use their own frequency in the 5ghz range to communicate but even if they arent too far apart the range on each one is good. I don't know exactly how many devices because I forgot the password to get on but it is probably over 50 on a rbr50 router + 2 satellites.