For the past 10 years, I was running a somewhat complicated but stable setup for my home network. It consisted of two routers – both running DD-WRT, one in bridge mode but acting as a wireless access point and the other being my main router connected to my cable modem. The wireless AP had its own set of two SSIDs, one that was used by my devices and one network for guests to connect to while the main router had its own SSID. The reason for this complicated setup was because the house was big enough and the routers not powerful enough to blanket the space with proper wifi coverage. I did experiment with trying to make one of the routers a true WiFI extender but ran into a variety of annoying issues that made me give up and settle on this complicated and stable arrangement. For the most part, this arrangement worked fine – the main issue was that occasionally a device would get stuck on the wrong WiFI network (connected to upstairs router while device was downstairs and therefore not getting adequate signal), but this was easily fixed by manually switching networks on the device.
Last year, I finally decided to try out the new fangled mesh network systems instead of my hodge-podge arrangement (I feel like I was ahead of the curve here in creating my own mesh network with two routers instead of trying to find one super-powerful router to cover the house). After a brief look at the landscape, I settled on AmplifiHD as it looked great and is built by Ubiquiti which has a great reputation for building enterprise grade network gear for the home. Instead of picking up the standard mesh gear, I picked up two AmplifiHD routers. The reason was that I needed an ethernet bridge downstairs as well as I prefer wired connectivity when I can especially to my media heavy devices like Xbox One. The devices look great and it is very straightforward to set them up so that one router is the main router and the other is a wireless access point with ethernet backhaul. For all intents and purposes, the setup is similar to what I had before except that instead of the two WiFI networks being separate, they operate as one network.
Overall, I’m very happy with the setup – it has worked flawlessly for over a year, haven’t had to troubleshoot anything so far. I do find it a bit odd and annoying that I need my phone to interact with my router meaningfully (the web interface is *very slowly* progressing but nowhere close to being a usable interface for monitoring or controlling the router). One major benefit of this setup is that a lot of home automation stuff works a lot better when everything is connected to the same WiFI network – a prime example of this is the Logitech Harmony Hub which can only reliably detect and control devices on the same network it is connected to.