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When you buy a router, it's supposed to give you perfect coverage over your entire house, right? As you have probably already experienced at some point, that is not always the case. Certain building materials, large spaces, and heavy tech equipment can disrupt Wi-Fi signals and interrupt your connection.
If one router fails to provide every corner of the house with adequate Wi-Fi coverage, mesh network systems and range extenders are great ways to strengthen Wi-Fi signal and fix dead spots in your home. But what's the difference, and which one is best for you?
Before You Buy: Is an Upgrade Even Needed?
It's important to note that range extenders and mesh systems aren’t a magic fix that improve speeds in every situation. If your problem is caused by congestion from your neighbors, a poorly placed router, or a cheap internet package with slow speeds, a mesh system isn’t going to solve your problem. Before buying anything, do the following:
1. Measure Signal Strength
“Mesh systems and extenders are primarily designed to solve one problem: Bad signal strength,” says Joel Crane, a Certified Wireless Network Expert and Wi-Fi Engineer at Juniper Networks. “Before making an investment in a mesh Wi-Fi system, check to see if you have any signal strength issues in the places where you need to use Wi-Fi.”
He recommends using a free tool like InSSIDer Lite to map your home’s signal strength—as you walk around the house with the tool running, make note of any spots that have poor signal. “Any signal strength between -67 and -30 dBm is good,” he says. “Once you dip below -67 or -70 dBm, performance will start to degrade. Below -80 dBm, things probably won't work reliably at all.” (Remember, those are negative numbers, so -80 dBm is lower than -67 dBm.)
2. Test Your Internet Connection
If you don’t find any dead spots, then the problem could be with your internet package, rather than the Wi-Fi network. Check your bill to see what speeds you're paying for, then take a moment to test your connection to see if they're the same.
Do the speeds match? If you find this speed to be too slow, you would need to upgrade your internet package to see faster speeds (or switch to a faster ISP entirely). However, if the speeds are significantly slower than what it says on your bill, you may have some work to do or equipment to buy.
3. Reposition Your Existing Router
If you have outage areas or aren't getting the speeds you should expect, there are simple ways to boost your Wi-Fi signal. For instance, you could move the router to a new location in the house and solve the problem without needing to buy new hardware.
Basic dos and don'ts include placing your wireless router in the center of your home, away from walls, heavy-duty appliances, electronics, and other obstructions. You may also want to position any external antennas vertically and elevate the router as high as possible. Doing this will help optimize the router's ability to cover the entire house.
What is a Wi-Fi Range Extender?
If you do need some help extending your Wi-Fi, “Wi-Fi extenders typically connect to your existing wireless network, broadcast a new network name, and blindly relay traffic back to your wireless router,” Crane explained to us. “This usually means that you'll see two network names: One network offered by your wireless router, and another network offered by the extender.”
You’ve probably seen this before, where a home’s network has a "SmithHouse" for upstairs and "SmithHouse_EXT" for downstairs. Your devices will often stay on one until it's completely out of range, then you can switch over to the closer range extender to get a better connection.
However, this also means you still have slow Wi-Fi at multiple points in your house. Repeating the entire Wi-Fi signal is inefficient—that extender merely listens to every packet and rebroadcasts it. There's no internal logic that sends packets to the right path. Plus, having to manually switch back and forth between networks as you move around is a huge hassle.
More importantly, though, range extenders can often slow things down. Wireless is “half duplex,” which means a wireless device can't send and receive information at the same time—every device on the same channel has to take turns talking. Range extenders exacerbate this inefficiency, says Crane, since they have to repeat every single thing they “hear” like someone following you around all day, repeating everything you say before someone else can talk.
Finally, managing these extenders is often a pain. Many routers require you to open a web page to alter settings or download updates, and if your extender is from a different brand, you'll be dealing with two sets of software. In many cases, that software can feel complex and archaic.
There are exceptions to all of these points, of course. Some range extenders have more modern software and can overcome some of the bandwidth issues when paired with routers from the same manufacturers that are designed to be used together. But there's no guarantee you can do it with your existing router, and at that point, the line between extender and mesh system gets a bit blurry.
Our Top-Rated Wireless Range Extenders
What is a Mesh Network?
Unlike an extender, which you can add to an existing Wi-Fi network, mesh systems are typically complete replacements for your Wi-Fi system. You can use them in tandem with your current router, but there's usually little reason to (unless your ISP requires it). They're designed to replace your complicated router-and-extender setup with multiple identical units placed around your house that are used together.
While replacing your current router might scare some folks off, remember that this is currently a much more attractive option now that Wi-Fi standards are far simpler to navigate. Wi-Fi 6 (and Wi-Fi 6E) offer significant improvements in both bandwidth and security, plus Wi-Fi 6 router or compatible mesh system are far cheaper than they used to be now that they're more common.
Even without Wi-Fi 6, mesh has several advantages over traditional extenders. “Home mesh systems like Eero, Google Nest WiFi, and Linksys Velop use mesh ‘access points,’ which are all aware of each other, and can wirelessly forward traffic around the network as needed,” says Crane. “They all broadcast the same network name, which enables your Wi-Fi devices like phones and laptops to roam between mesh access points as they choose,” and makes the handoff more seamless than extenders.
Furthermore, because mesh units run the same software, they're able to relay traffic more intelligently. That means if you're connected to the second node on the far end of the house, it's only going to rebroadcast packets if the client in question is actually connected to it.
Mesh systems can also overcome some of the speed problems that extenders have by using multiple radios to send and receive information simultaneously. “They can use a 2.4GHz channel to communicate with the client and then use their 5GHz channel to relay data to the other mesh access points on the network,” says Crane. Some mesh systems may even have three radios—one dedicated to communicating with the router, and two for communicating with other devices.
This is particularly useful when you have a lot of devices on the network, so I’d recommend buying a tri-band model if possible. The Amazon Eero Pro 6E is a tri-band mesh system that supports Wi-Fi 6E and includes a Zigbee smart home hub built into the core router. Its Wi-Fi 6 sibling, the Eero 6, is a relatively affordable way to jump into mesh networking.
Finally, setting up and managing your network is much easier with modern mesh systems. Instead of dealing with multiple configuration pages, you can manage the network from an app. Many mesh systems also update their firmware automatically, which is a huge step up over the days of having to check the manufacturer's web page for updates, downloading a file, and sending it to the router manually. Most users don't even go through this arduous process, leaving them vulnerable to security threats, so you're more likely to get regular updates by buying mesh.
Our Top-Rated Wi-Fi Mesh Network Systems
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