CPL+Fast roaming or Mesh of dual-band APs

Installing and Using OpenWrt
1

Dear friends,

I am connected to 1Gb/s fiber and I would like to extend coverage of WIFI for home use. As this is an old house and I cannot have RJ-45 wires for the backbone, there are two alternatives:

  • Connect ac Wifi APs to a CPL backbone running at 2Gb/s (this should be 1Gb/s in reality) but this speed is shared between all CPL devices (like in WIFI). Once the APs are connected to the CPL backbone, I only need to enable fast-roaming. APs can operate on different frequencies to avoid sharing the same bandwidth. Theoratically, this makes it possible to achive full-speed as clients would be able to connect in WIFI ac on the 5Ghz band.

  • Build a full mesh network with dual-band 5Ghz/2.4 Ghz APs. The backbone would be a mesh on 5Ghz Wifi AC and I would use the 2.4 Ghz band for client access. As the mesh operates on one frequency, the backbone bandwidth is shared between all APs. My house is quite isolated, no interference. My AP only offers wifi g/n on 2.4 Ghz, so not full speed on client side when using WIFI. The only way to achieve full-speed on client side ... is to connect to one of the mesh AP with an RJ-45 cable.

What is your opinion? Is CPL technology mature enough to allow a backbone between APs? Are some of you using CPL successfuly? Or would you recommand mesh on dual band?

Kind regards,

1 Like
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I read on the Internet that CPL speed is dropping dramatically and is not as interesting as WIFI Mesh. Do you confirm?

As there is no intereference in my house, building a 5Ghz mesh WIFI ac backbone seems more reliable.