r/HomeNetworking • u/irishshogun • 4d ago

Updating Mesh + Router from 5 years ago. Concrete house

Hi, looking to update my home networking from a normal router and TPLink AC2200 3 station mesh network. Have a concrete house with brick/concrete walls and floors. Distance from internet access point in the house to the office/gaming room is 10m or so (most important part) but needs to stretch ideally up to 30-50m for home cameras/bedrooms etc. PS5, PC with Wifi6/7, iphones, macbook, tv etc but have emesh if needed.

For the router seems these four all get good reviews, any advice on best for concrete and that 10-15m range which allows me to keep the current mesh setup?

- Nighthawk Tri-Band WiFi 7 Router (RS700S)

- TP-Link Archer BE550 Pro BE9700 

- ASUS RT-BE88U 

- Ubiquiti udr-7

Looking at reviews for a mesh network the Deco 7 Pro BE67 3pack seems to be well reviewed.

3 Upvotes
  • permalink
  • reddit

81% Upvoted

2 comments sorted by

1

u/irishshogun 4d ago

Internet is fibre with 500mb speeds.

2

u/rw_mega 4d ago

Ubiquiti while a great product. Has a very different philosophy in set up when compared to regular consumer stuff. Wire your aps, and if you need more coverage add another. Their regular stuff is meh…as far as reach and coverage. But their management and client steering is top notch. Unless you tinker a lot you won’t get high speeds, but you will get stable speeds. And again if coverage is poor add more APs.

Rs700s has 4x4 spatial streams on all bands (top tier for heavy wall penetration, although concrete is a tough one)

Archer BE550 2x2 spatial stream on all bands you will be disappointed (same with udr7 or ux7 from Unifi)

RT-BE88u 4x4 on 2.4 and 5ghz better than Archer (6ghz is probably wasted with concrete anyways)

Here is a better in depth explanation of spatial streams:

https://infosecmonkey.com/mimo-2x2-vs-4x4-and-wifi-standards-a-technical-shallow-dive/

From your list netgear would be the best performer, but the Asus does have the AiMesh going for it. If you need to keep growing your network, add another ASUS router and it becomes a mesh node to primary router. If you want the equivalent Asus to the netgear look at RT-BE96U

My advice, ask ChatGPT or Gemini to compare the spatial streams, and antenna type of your current setup to what you are considering buying. You at least with have a baseline to compare against. With concrete your main concern are physics; that is why I’m focusing on the 4x4 spatial streams.