The Best Wi-Fi Mesh-Networking Kits for Most People

Mesh-networking kits, which use multiple access points spread around your house, are a great alternative to traditional routers for large and troublesome homes where a single powerful router won’t cut it. After spending over 50 hours testing nine mesh Wi-Fi networking kits in a large, complicated, multilevel home, we’re confident the Netgear Orbi kit is the best choice for most people. Our testing, however, also showed that most people will still be fine with our current router pick.

Thanks to a dedicated high-bandwidth Wi-Fi connection between the base and the satellite, the Orbi kit had the best throughput and range of the kits we tested, even with only two units to the other kits’ three. The simple “Put the router where the Internet is, put the satellite in the middle of your house” instructions are impossible to screw up, and the two-unit setup also means that your laptops or phones spend less time shifting from one access point to another—or, worse, not reconnecting when they should.

For the tech-savvy, Netgear’s Orbi is the only mesh kit we tested that provides the features of a high-end router, from port forwarding to static routing, along with plenty of Ethernet ports on both units; it’s also one of the few that don’t require an Internet connection to set up or control your network. Orbi is the mesh kit that’s most like a router-and-extender combo, without the drawbacks that usually come with that setup.

If the Netgear Orbi RBK50 kit is sold out or too expensive, or if you have a very long house with the Internet connection at one end and you don’t want a Plume pod in every room, consider Eero. It’s not quite as fast or easy to set up as Orbi, but it blanketed our test environment in usable Wi-Fi and has improved much since we originally tested it in late 2016. Eero nodes are typically available in a three-unit kit, with each physically identical, inoffensively styled, low-profile node designed to sit flat on a shelf or desk. Each Eero node has two wired Ethernet ports and can connect in single-hop (“star”) or multi-hop (“tree”) topologies, or plug directly into your wired network if you have jacks available where you want to place them.

A six-pack of tiny Plume pods is cheaper than an Orbi two-pack and covers about the same area, and a three-pack is fine for small spaces. Plume doesn’t offer Orbi’s overwhelming signal strength, and its throughput isn’t the fastest at short range, but it is consistent throughout an entire house, and its impressively low network latency is noticeable in day-to-day use. Plume also doesn’t have as many advanced networking features as Orbi does, but many people don’t need those. Setup is particularly easy: Put a pod in every room (or every other room, in bigger houses), and let Plume’s cloud optimizer figure out how to connect them together.

Why you should trust us

I’ve been professionally testing and deploying wired and wireless networking gear in homes and businesses for the better part of 20 years. I’ve also written feature articles on networking and storage for Ars Technica and Opensource.com.

For this guide, I supplemented my own observations with reviews from SmallNetBuilder and CNET, as well as calls directly to engineers or founders at Netgear, Luma, AmpliFi, Plume, and Eero. I also checked Amazon reviews and Reddit threads, and I solicited the opinions of a few other network professionals. Finally, I spent most of a day per kit testing for throughput, latency, features, and general user experience in a challenging physical environment that cries out for multiple-access-point networking to solve its issues.

Who this is for

In my experience, complaints about Wi-Fi come in two basic flavors: “Why does using the Internet stink in this room?” and “Why is it so slow to copy these files?” Both of those problems have more to do with coverage and latency (how long it takes for your inputs to reach the other end of the connection) than with raw speed—a solid 5-megabits-per-second connection with low, consistent latency will feel a lot faster and more reliable than an iffy, inconsistent 25 Mbps. Installing a mesh-networking kit will almost certainly solve both problems, but it won’t be the most affordable choice, and it won’t always be the best solution for a particular house.

You should consider a mesh-networking kit if you have a house that a single powerful router can’t cover, such as a large house (say, above 3,000 square feet), a small house with signal-killing interior walls (like lath-and-plaster, brick, or concrete blocks), or a house with a complicated layout. But before you toss everything out and get a mesh-networking kit, you should try moving your router to a central location. Or if you already have a good router that you like, and you need just a little more range in part of your house, you could consider adding a wireless extender, though the quality of those devices varies extremely widely. (We have a comprehensive guide to wireless extenders, which we’ll revisit later this year.) Finally, if your house is wired for Ethernet, you can run Ethernet cable to inexpensive wireless access points to get the benefits of the mesh-network kits we cover here, but at a much lower cost. Mesh doesn’t really start to shine until you don’t have wires, don’t want wires, and have lots of trouble spots (or one really big trouble spot) with poor or no coverage.

Mesh doesn’t really start to shine until you don’t have wires, don’t want wires, and have lots of trouble spots (or one really big trouble spot) with poor or no coverage.

Typically a mesh kit won’t make your network faster than a decent connection to an 802.11ac router—none of the mesh kits we tested outperformed the TP-Link Archer C7, our recommendation in our stand-alone Wi-Fi router guide, when we had a good connection to the router. However, mesh can offer better coverage in a wider area, which will make your connection feel faster because your devices aren’t grabbing at faint wisps of signal. A network with multiple access points, like a mesh, can also sometimes handle a large number of devices (smartphones, tablets, laptops, and so forth) better than a single Wi-Fi router can—though very few homes or even small businesses will have more devices than a single good Wi-Fi router can handle.

Some mesh kits offer family-friendly features—such as Luma’s network filtering or Eero’s “family pause”—that are generally easier to use than similar features in traditional routers. Ease of setup is what really sets mesh apart from other Wi-Fi approaches. Adding a traditional network extender to your existing network might involve familiarizing yourself with the UI of a different brand than your current router, configuring it to work the way you want it to, and then praying that it does. Meanwhile, a mesh-networking kit promises to simply work, and the company behind it promises to support the whole thing if you have trouble.

How we picked and tested

In the future we may need to rule out kits by speed, specs, or price, but with so few home mesh-networking kits currently for sale, we’ve so far been able to test everything available (not just announced, in crowdfunding, or in preproduction, but actually available when we started testing). Our first round of testing included the Eero, Luma, and Netgear Orbi kits, as well as both the HD and (now discontinued) standard versions of the AmpliFi kit. For our current round, we added the Linksys Velop, Google Wifi, Amped Ally, and Plume kits, as well as a thorough retesting of the Orbi and Eero kits, both of which had received new firmware promising markedly improved performance since the first time we tested them.

A note on rated speeds

You shouldn’t get too excited about each device’s claimed speed class, such as AC3200 or AC1750. These ratings refer to theoretical maximum ceilings defined in the abstract specifications of wireless protocols, and they have less to do with real-world performance than the biggest number on a compact car’s speedometer does. Honestly, it’s even worse than that: Your Civic will at least break 100 mph, but your “AC3200” router won’t ever get close to a single gigabit per second, much less 3.2 Gbps.

Test environment

For the objective tests—coverage and performance—we set up each kit’s units in a challenging home environment. The two-story, 3,500-square-foot house we used is built into a hillside, and while its top floor opens onto the front yard, its bottom floor opens onto the backyard. What makes this such a tough house to cover adequately is the location of its network closet (where the Internet connection comes in), plus the foundation slab underneath half the top floor. For most of the bottom floor, a straight line to the base unit in the networking closet goes through the foundation slab—and in some cases, through several feet of packed earth underneath it—effectively killing any direct Wi-Fi signal.

We tested latency and throughput in each of the four corners in both floors, as well as inside a parked car in the driveway outside. Ideally, we’d like to see an average latency of 10 milliseconds or less and a peak latency of 25 ms or less at each test site. (For reference, a wired connection provides well under 1 ms latency, average or peak.)

For the three-piece kits, such as the AmpliFi, Eero, Google Wifi, Luma, and Velop offerings, we kept the base device in the network closet where the Internet connection was, sat the first satellite on a desk in the farther upstairs bedroom, and put the second satellite in the kitchen, just above the downstairs bedroom.