Mesh network for better wifi coverage

Tenda MW6 Nova Wave 2 802.11AC, Mu-Mimo Whole Home Wi-Fi Mesh System, 3-Pack

I bought a three pack tenda wifi mesh network for $129 Amazon. I’ve been wanting a set ever since Google announced theirs but didn’t want to pay $299 for a three pack at the time. I saw this a SlickDeals a few months back and am very glad I upgraded my home wireless network with this. The wireless router was on the bottom floor in the center, but I could never play videos reliably upstairs (even 1Mbps was problematic). I tried using my old WRT54GL (Tomato firmware) in bridge mode to extend the wireless of the main router. I certainly got more wifi signal bars, but the transfer speed and latency did not improve. I also tried various wireless extenders by Netgear and TP Wireless, but neither gave acceptable results. I still got stutter on the video play and had constant complaints about YouTube videos with the spinning wheel of death.

After I upgraded to the Tenda Mesh Network, I am very happy with the results.

Local network transfers are 99% of 1Gbps. Latency is much better, and I don’t have any issues streaming videos upstairs.

Luckily, I have cable modem separate from my wireless router, so it was easy to replace the router with the cube. The second cube, I placed along the stairwell giving it near light of sight between the first cube and the third cube. The third cube went to the other side of our bedroom. The added benefit is outside WiFi coverage also got better.

One of the cons with cube’s router is that it is very basic. Compared to my LinkSys WRT200N, it doesn’t offer much in terms of configuration. So, I may have to set the cube on Bridged mode and take all network configuration ques from the LinkSys I plan to put in between. So, my final configuration will be:

  1. Cable Modem
  2. LinkSys Router (DHCP, DNS, port forwarding, etc)
  3. Nova Tenda Mesh Cube in Bridge Mode