aka, I need more WiFi in my home.
If you have recently upgraded your home to faster internet but the WiFi leaves you wanting more read on. Cable Company routers have average WiFi range at best and big Gaming Routers can get pricey. The good news is that for 99% of you there is a fix.
Recently my parents upgraded their home internet to fiber. Generally speaking Fiber is much more reliable and faster than cable internet or 5G wireless. The 5G companies don’t want to admit it but Wired has always been better than wireless. I wrote an article about it over 20 years ago in a long defunct magazine and it hasn’t changed. Every time wireless gets better, wired gets even better. But like most people my parents home is older so WiFi becomes the necessary evil for our modern world. Punching out walls for faster internet doesn’t really make sense when WiFi is as good as it is now. Only the most serious gamers and live streams need wired networks. Give up the aluminum hats, even if you don’t have WiFi, the 5G signals are all around you. For my parents, WiFi is the only solution.
Cable Company Solutions
The Cable Company installed two WiFi extenders by Altice. Both of them were DOA when I stopped by for a holiday visit. Being a fan of Mesh networking I picked up two Netgear AX1600 “Mesh Network WiFi Extenders” to replace the two failed Altice extenders. That’s were the fun began. Before you buy any Netgear Extenders make sure you read the rest of this since Netgear keeps deleting my posts on their website but they are upgrading my status.
A true Mesh Network creates a giant net of coverage. You can daisy chain devices, or you can spread them all around to cover large areas. The technology is amazing and sadly Netgear doesn’t have it in the devices we used and tested. The Netgear AX1600 is NOT a Mesh networking device, it is simply a very solid WiFi Extender that can easily double the coverage of your Cable company provided router.
I use a true mesh networking system in my home. In order to cover my house, garage and yard there are three devices in a triangle-ish layout. What makes Mesh unique is the fact that any one point can fail and the rest pick up the load. If one has a giant load on it like my wife streaming multiple 4K movies, my gaming console swaps to another less crowded path. Think of Mesh like having WAZE for your home network.
While setting up the Netgear AX1600 Mesh networking wifi extenders, I couldn’t get the network to work. One thing I have never had trouble doing is getting a solid network running. As the CoolToys® guy, I have built some amazing systems for massive homes. So I broke out the big tools and quickly found the problem which was confirmed by Netgear engineering in this post.
UnMeshing Netgear
When you add the second AX1600 to extend the WiFi coverage in the house, it also connects to the main router instead of meshing with both the main router and the other AX1600. This creates massive traffic problems that quickly lead to gridlock of the WiFi. Simply unplugging one of the AX1600’s and reseting the main router solved the problem but it killed all three TV receivers. They used WPS only instead of letting me manually configure them with a password. At the end, I didn’t get the coverage I wanted but I got just enough to make my parents happy after a lot of testing.
The AX1600 is very easy to set up and configure if you only have one. It doesn’t have a cord, it just plugs in like one of those annoying air freshener pods. So finding the right plug close enough to the main router to maintain at least 150MBpS up and down while at the same time getting the range out to the gazebo at the pool took some work. 99% of the homes in the US will be very happy with the extra coverage the AX1600 provides, just don’t try to use two of them.
The side note warning is that with two AX1600’s hitting the low end cable company router, the router shut down the WiFi. Maybe it thought it was having a DoS attack? The reset of the cable router disconnected all three TV boxes. With the WiFi back up and at full speed, the TV’s wouldn’t connect to the main router via WPS. The fix was to temporarily unplug the Netgear device and then connect the TV’s with the weaker WiFi signal with WPS. Once all Three TV’s were back online then I plugged in the single AX1600 and WiFi happiness was found, pixelation was gone and WiFi coverage at the pool was still providing 4K streaming speeds.