I am thinking of building a mesh wifi Network for my home. My appartment is "only" 74 m² big and I think about 3 meshpoints (1 meshportal in the middle and 2 points)
I would like to have 2,4 and 5 GHz WIFI as well as minimum one LAN Connection to Plug in a device or powering the device through POE (it's only a nice to have feature! No big problem if not.)
I don't want to buy a system like Unifi or Google Wifi and so on... I already got some Netgear WNDAP360 in the company with LEDE / OpenWRT. But one device cost about 100 €.. 3x100€-> 300 €... For this amount of money I can easily buy a Unifi System...
What router / AccessPoint can you recommend to me? Or any other system / firmware?
I am living in a 75m2 appartement myself, which is even fairly stretched (way longer than its width) and a single WiFi router is more than enough to cover everything with good signal and speed. Might be the easiest option, unless you like playing around with mesh solutions
TP-Link has not too expensive wall mounted WiFi-AP points with an Ethernet connector and it’s POE. It means running a cable, which you need anyway for POE and no mesh, just Access Points. Not sure if they are powerful enough to run OpenWRT, but as simple AP I don’t think it’s a big deal.
Without POE any cheap WiFi router capable of OpenWRT should work (MT7628 + MT7612) would probably be the cheapest. I’m meshing with old 4/32 TP-Link (2.4 only) routers that I had laying around and that works very well. Most AC routers have at least 128/8 so you could run additional services on them in the process.
I use TP-Link Archer C7s as they (a) have decent radios and are 802.11ac, (b) support 802.11s under OpenWRT, and (c) are cheap on the used market here (US$40 or less).
I've got 150 m^2 single family house for 4 people and one wrt1900acs is probably sufficient. To give slightly extended coverage to front and back yard I run one cat5e towards the back, and one powerline device to the front, and hang two older tplink openwrt devices. Those powerline devices are pretty good these days. I think mine are zyxel av2000.
So if your goal is coverage I'd say get two tplink Enterprise AP devices. If your goal is learning about meshes, the Archer c7 Jeff is using probably makes good sense.
Thanks to all for your answers
I think my FritzBox 6590 should also be enougt to cover my complete appartement , but I want to learn and play around with mesh
Also I like to have the LAN Port to connect a device like a smart home device in the fuse box of my appartment or at any place I like
I also looked at some TP-Link routers.. But I thought I'm going to ask here and maybe I get the answer "Take this oder take this there are features xyz wich are better for meshing" or anything like that
I have read, that some Wifi Mesh Devices talk with a secial frequency together so there is more bandwith for the devices like mobilephone or tablet or anything else
As far as I know, unlicensed, consumer wireless devices with moderate to high bandwidth typically use either 2.4 GHz or 5 GHz.
Yes, dual-band, simultaneous operation is likely important as otherwise you end up with your APs on the same channel, fighting for time slots and bandwidth. Most "laptop" cards are not simultaneous dual-band operation, as they are designed to be a client on one band or another at a given point in time.
If you're interested in "playing with" mesh, then check that the device's drivers support both 802.11s and ad-hoc mesh. That will give you the most options to explore. (Most of the Realtek 802.11ac USB devices don't support 802.11s through the mac80211 Linux drivers, for example)
