Mesh Network Recommendations?

CrowTheRobot · August 13, 2025

My house isn't super large (1200-ish square feet) but we're in the process of adding a 700 square foot wrap-around deck to the side and back, and we're in preliminary talks to add an additional office room above our garage on the opposite side of the house. Obviously it would be more ideal to place the modem and main router more centrally located, but I'd like to put them in the office to better allow a wired internet connection for when my wife and I are working from home, but we still want a good spread of coverage for entertaining, like with the portable projector I bought for movie nights on the deck. Our house is also split-level which I feel potentially complicates things a bit in terms of placements and interference in between.

At the moment we have an ASUS router that is connected to a separate Mesh AP from ASUS that we added a couple years after buying the router. They're okay but I've had some weird issues lately on my WFH days, and the AP lately seems to randomly have issues which seems to disrupt my Ecobee. I'm thinking that I might want to try something less "cobbled together" and work it into the budget for the projects.

I know Ubiquiti makes common appearances at both the LMG offices and in AMD Upgrades, but I feel really out of my element looking at their site, and running off PoE makes me worry that we'd have to add to the scope of work to wire APs.

So maybe a big question thats been answered elsewhere, but recommendations? I'm open to Ubiquiti if someone is able to help piece together what would be needed.

SpookyCitrus · August 13, 2025

I'm using a TP-Link Deco WiFi 6E(2 AP) setup I got for less than $300 bucks and the ISP provided modem router combo in a similarly sized house and get my full 1GB in my office with my desktop plugged into the Mesh AP via ethernet and my main AP and router is across the house in my kitchen. My WiFi speeds through the whole house are 700MB/s+, they have options for 3 or 4 AP setups if you were wanting a more even coverage or to add a mesh AP to the room above the garage.

This is the setup I'm using. Though it was on sale for $249.99 back in March when I purchased it and I believe it was a Used: Like New not brand new one that I ordered. I could not tell that it had even been opened when it arrived though.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BCWDKKCV?ref=fed_asin_title&th=1

NobleGamer · August 14, 2025

6 hours ago, CrowTheRobot said:

At the moment we have an ASUS router that is connected to a separate Mesh AP from ASUS that we added a couple years after buying the router. They're okay but I've had some weird issues lately on my WFH days, and the AP lately seems to randomly have issues which seems to disrupt my Ecobee.

If the ASUS hardware both don't have AI mesh, then yes I would call that more cobbled together compared to having two ASUS routers or APs with AI mesh. I had the latter in a 3 pack of ASUS Zen Mini AX1800, and it worked fine with a dozen devices on a 100-200mbps ISP with two APs wired, only one of them with wireless backhaul just one room away from a wired AP.

If they randomly have issues, it could be advanced settings, congestion if you expect your network to handle closer to 1gbps than mine at 200mbps, interference on channel overlap (check with the free Wifiman app on a wifi device), lots of devices, or maybe your wireless APs have a weak singal because they are too far from your wired AP or have stuff blocking singal in between.

A lot of these problems don't go away if you switch hardware brand unless you know what the root cause is AND you know that another brand's hardware specs will resolve such issues.

So I personally would've stuck with the Zen Mini AX1800 consumer mesh networking if it handled more than 2 VLANs, wifi portal sites, and RADIUS server & auth.

But Ubiquiti Unifi had all that and more, so I made the switch. There's a lot of wifi reception tweaking with Unifi unless you buy the latest hardware, but if you take time to figure that out, it might work for some more wifi clients than ASUS' Smart Connect band steering, which when wifi clients work with it, that works really well.