Because of the hacky approach - after all, power lines were not designed to carry network traffic - Powerline devices offer significantly lower throughput than a real networking solution, but they are incredibly convenient to set up. My first attempt at compensating for these black spots was to setup two Powerline devices, which run internet over the electricity lines in the house, essentially creating Ethernet endpoints in any room where you have a plug socket. Streaming content from Plex or Now TV or whatever was plagued with stuttering and buffering. For whatever reason, the Apple TV WiFi reception was always mediocre even for the box that was only adjacent to the room where the router resides. We have two Apple TVs hooked up to the living and family room televisions. The laptop fared better, presumably because its internal antennas are larger and more powerful than the miniaturized iOS devices.

Our home internet will deliver 200 megabit download speeds over Ethernet. Speeds would top out around 20 Mbps in the best case, with usage interrupted from the connection dropping out on phones and iPads. The master bedroom is, of course, diagonally opposite to where the router is situated and therefore suffered the most. Network performance on the old router was decent on the ground floor and mediocre upstairs. This is just a reality of the building and the access to the road. This is not ideal location for the network hub but we don’t really have a choice. Our internet comes into the house at the very front, from the side wall into the downstairs bedroom.

Now, we live in a two story family house with a fair number of thick walls. A combination of walls, interference from other devices and applications, and proximity to other networks competing for the same bandwidth all cause range and performance to degrade no matter how good your router’s antennas are. Even there, the very edges of the property would not be covered by reliable WiFi. The one router served us well, in the main living areas, kitchen, and bedrooms. Read on for my my hands-on with the Netgear Orbi mesh WiFi system.Ī WiFi router is best placed in a central location in the home with no obstructions around it. I was pleasantly surprised with how good it was. I kind of passed it over, thinking it was more of a marketing gimmick, but I recently got the chance to review one such mesh WiFi system. A couple of years ago, mesh WiFi became a popular buzzword. I used AirPort Extreme for a while, and then a variety of third-party options. Historically, I have flitted between many different routers.

Mesh router for mac