Would an Eero upgrade be worthwhile?

[David_A]

Hi, we have Fibre 150 with an Eero 6 supplied by TT. We also have our own Eero 5 acting as an extender. Our 1930's house has brick walls and we only get 40Mbps in some rooms.  Would upgrading the extender to an Eero 6 improve the throughput?  i.e. Is WiFi 6 appreciably better at penetrating brick?

[mrwrighty]

DO NOT BUY CAT7 or CAT8. Waste of money and cheap versions can cause more problems.

Cat6a is more than sufficient for consumer installs handling up to 10gbps speeds. CAT8 is technically a different specification of cable with different earthing posts. Unless you are running 25gbps inter-server connections in data centres ignore them.

[ONTnonotagain]

Hi David,

You may want to try centralising the location of the 1st box with a longer RJ45 cable Cat6 or above from the ONT although a 5, 5a will work still but if you go to the extreme of lifting floorboards to hide it why not start with the best cable, clip it to the joists as well or you may find Monty will arrive and use the cable as his dinner, it won't stop him if he's determined but if it's up out of the way chances are he won't notice it. I had this issue a couple of times until a good Tom came to live next door & he keeps the population down now.

You can get the cable on the usual big shopping sites or one of the PC vendors like Scan etc, go for at least a 10M one if you have an average house although I find the 20M is about right for most fits.

Place it in the middle of the house and have a satellite one above it on the next floor up.

I've never used an Eero myself but the more central in your house you can place any router system the better spread you will get signal wise, hth.

Onta.

[Michelle-TalkTalk]

Morning,

How are you getting on?

Thanks 

[KeithFrench]

Hi @David_A 

There can be advantages with WiFi6, as this can operate not just on the 5GHz band, but also the 2.4GHz band. This could give greater range at pretty good 802.11ax speeds. As an example (OK not the same as your scenario) in my garden, I am out of range of the 5GHz band, but can get about 500Mbps link speed from laptop to router. The overall speed is of course reduced to the approx speed of your fibre. In your case it will depend on several factors though:-

1. First off, do you have any WiFi 6 capable network adapters in your devices, if not, forget WiFi 6 altogether.
2. If you do, the level of WiFi interference needs to be low.
3. Just how bad is the signal attenuation between rooms & floors?

I would investigate what you have, before spending any money. First, use a WiFi analyser & see if you can detect the 5GHz backhaul SSID coming out of the main Eero. It is probably a hidden network, with Eero mesh I don't know what format it takes. Try looking at all hidden networks & find one where the BSSID (think of this as the MAC address of this network), is it close to the normal 5GHz BSSID address? If you can find this, start moving away from the main Eero to find rooms where the signal strength is not too bad, these could be possible locations to site another Eero 6 (using an Eero 5 in conjunction with an Eero 6 just reduces the capabilities of the Eero 6 down to an Eero 5).

I can help with this if you want.

[martswain]

The higher the frequency the worse the penetration through solid surfaces, so 5 or  6 GHz bands will be worse than the 2.4 GHz.

WiFi 6 is technical specification, it is not the new 6 GHZ band.

[mrwrighty]

5Ghz and Wifi 6 are less likely to penetrate hard walls unlike 2.4Ghz. Under such circumstances if you need Wifi6 then additional Eero nodes are the only way, but bear in mind that the Wifi Mesh still needs to penetrate the walls. With such properties sometimes its better to bite the bullet and hardwire access points to give the best possible user experience. If you can wire the Eero via ethernet this will improve matters. 

[Karl-TalkTalk]

Hi

If the walls are particularly thick, then more devices may be better when strategically placed. 

Whilst wifi 6 may give a stronger signal, this may not be enough to penetrate through the walls, so an extender system that used the electrical wiring to send the signal may be better.

Karll