WAVLINK Mesh WiFi System–Up to 3,000-4,000 sq. ft. Whole Home Coverage WiFi Router/Extender Replacement, Dual-Band 2.4GHz+5Ghz, 4 x Internal Antennas, Support Touch Link Function, 3-Pack

This mesh Wi-Fi set is excellent. Installation is surprisingly easy, once done you can easily get great connections from anywhere in your home/office and its immediate surround. A nice feature is the mesh boxes have a socket on them. I positioned one by my tv, and ran a Cat 5 wire from it to the back of my tv. Now I don’t have to wait for Hulu to see my Wi-Fi network, its up and streaming instantly.

I’ve had a few of these WiFi extenders over the years, and had varying degrees of success with them. They have gotten better, smaller and cheaper, but this one, though small and inexpensive, is much different from those other types of extenders. This one uses a mesh system of three boosting units you place in various areas of the house. The first one should be near the router. The units are small, discreet and look nice, so if you place them in spots out in the open, which I think is better for their overall operation, you hardly even notice them. If you’ve never set one of these extenders up, they can be daunting and certainly cause a lot of headaches, but this one wasn’t too bad as long as you follow instructions and be prepared to do the same things over and over to get it up and running. Some reviews recommend keeping these systems hard wired in, especially if your wireless connection isn’t great, and that’s good advice. Where I live is semi-rural and we’ve never gotten the advertised speed we pay for. Never. And the house is sort of a split level configuration on a hillside surrounded by what must be boulders made of solid lead as cellular service isn’t too good out here either. I can’t get a good signal for anything in my living room. The Wavlink mesh system did get the signal to the far reaching spots of the house where it had previously been iffy at best. For this low price, I can recommend this Wavlink Mesh System option before moving on to something more expensive, but I’m not saying I won’t do that at some point. If you live in a bad reception area, there may not be much any device at any price can do to make speed and internet connectivity as perfect as it is in larger cities and residential areas.

Let me be honest: I've not used a mesh network before, and don't know the technical details of how they work. Maybe what I want can't be done with them.What I wanted was a reliable wireless network in my house with good signal throughout. I have fiber-optic coming to the house and the phone company provides a router at the entry point. That router feeds both wifi and wired networks, plus a coax to the television. The location of that router isn't great for wifi coverage, as it's in one corner of the basement. Upstairs, we had an Apple Time Capsule for wifi access. That's getting old and doesn't support newer, faster protocols. I'm not sure that it was working very well.So I took one of these units and plugged it into the wired network. I soon had it working, but couldn't reach the printer, the fileserver, or any of the other computers in the house. That's because the WAVLINK had set up a new subnet using 192.168.10.X non-routeable IP addresses. OK, I've worked with wireless routers before that had to be in charge of their own subnet in order to reach the admin pages to set them up, and then the network cable moved to another port to allow them to operate as an access point for an existing network. So, I moved the ethernet cable from the "Internet" port to the "LAN" port. YES, it worked as an access point.Then I tried to set up a second one at the other end of the house. I could not find a way to get it to cooperate with the first one and form a mesh network with a single SSID. I left a message on the WAVLINK support website asking for advice, but never received a response. I'm guessing that they don't support this sort of operation and can't be bothered to even tell me that.

I tested these access points for a little over a month to see if they were a suitable alternative to Google Home WiFi which is much more expensive. They worked great, were very easy to setup, and have some very nice convince features.They were very fast. My connection directly from the back of the modem is 894Mbps wired and I was able to pull 662Mbps through these once setup. The design is nice and clean as well so you don't mind having them visible. Unlike other brands you want these to be out and easily accessible so you can utilize the Touch Link function, which allows you to tap the top of the unit and quickly connect to a guest network.This way you don't have to give friends or family your wifi password, you can just tap the unit and give them access to the the guest connection quick and easy. It doesn't give them access to your internal network so all of your other device should remain safe if someone is using a compromised device or you don't want them having access to other things on your network.

I tested this router in my new house to see which router would be my new wifi router especially during the time I was moving.These routers are a bit quirky, and I have tested Wavlink products before...Lets get into it;First of all, they are SMALL. Each one has only 2 ports, WAN/LAN in and then LAN out.So a switch is required if everything isn't wireless.. Really in order to have all 3 units have good performance, they need to be connected via LAN. The wireless connection system didn't work so well... Sometimes the repeaters would disconnect, and the range and performance is totally based on the placement of the first unit (obviously) however the overall signal strength isn't so wonderful no matter how I try to describe it. I think that the overall unit is just too small to have big antennas and since there are no external antenna's it just doesn't seem to have that great of a range.Once it is setup via wired; it does work alright, just not that wonderful as these 3 units had basically the same range as the 2 units I had before... so ultimately I decided to go with a different setup. However for a "budget mesh" it does quite well, especially if the 3 units can be connected via ethernet.