WiFi Extender recommendations please

[Jem2124]

What wifi extenders are you all using? Ours isn’t doing the job - a Devolo dLan 500. Need something that can extend wifi to most corners of a large house, concrete floors, brick walls. If it makes any difference, the house is an odd shape meaning that in a couple of rooms the most direct route between the router and the room is via two external walls and across a small outside patio area.

Have been googling but not drawn any conclusions so thought I would come to Mumsnet for real experiences!

Thanks.

I tried a lot of extenders and in the end the only thing that worked was putting the main hub right in the middle of the building, instead of near an outside wall.

If you can afford it go for a Mesh wifi system (which is like having a series of mini routers in the house); some systems are very expensive but I went with the Nova MW3 and have been astounded how good it is in a large house where we always had problems before.

A pack of 3 nodes are available for just under £70 online (or you could buy a twin pack and see if that will be sufficient, as you can add an extra node at anytime for about £25).

They are really easy to set up, connect the first node to your current router, then place the other(s) elsewhere for superb coverage.

We have one on the ground floor, one on the first and one on the 2nd floor for a great system (& we are a very heavy use wifi house).

You can also set the system to automatically reboot itself every night, to ensure peak stability & performance.

Thanks for replies. @tom5431 that's really helpful! I have been googling mesh systems today - having not heard of them before - and think that's definitely what we need. Good to have a recommendation because every review site is recommending different systems!

We have the BT Wholehub mesh system which was recommended to us. It's absolutely brilliant but was a bit cheaper when I bought it in September: BT wholehome

Perhaps have a think now, decide and then see if there are any offers for Black Friday?

The Nova MW3 system I recommended is the cheapest option, so is obviously not quite as good as some of the more expensive systems.

It's main limitation is that it caps the wifi speed at 100mbps, but seeing you can stream HD Video on Netflix at 5mbps this isn't really an issue (nb 100mbps is the theoretical maximum, in practice I get about 65 mbps throughout the house).

The other compromise involves the internal electrics and how they pass information between the nodes - I won't bore you with the detail, but in day-to-day use, if you use the wifi for web browsing, film & music streaming etc then it is absolutely brilliant, if however you have some serious Gamers in the house, then you might wish to go for a more expensive option as they will have better Latency figures (Latency is how long it takes data to travel between its source and destination, measured in milliseconds).

If you go for a more expensive option, as the other poster said the BT system has good reviews, Linksys or Netgear are usually good, though the system that is most often recommended by industry reviewers is Google Wifi (see www.techradar.com/uk/reviews/google-wifi).

Hope this helps!

We have the BT mesh system, which was the third thing I had tried after two different types of the kind of extender system which plugs into the electrical circuits. Occasionally it seems to temporarily drop connection between the different nodes, but mostly it works very well.

Thanks guys. Interesting to see good reviews of the BT system. @tom5431, that’s interesting and useful to know, thank you. Definitely going to try a mesh system but just not sure which one ..l I have four different review tabs open on Safari at the moment.

Thanks for the suggestion to wait for Black Friday sales @WingDefence ... hadn’t occurred to me but definitely will.