Hello,
Im looking for recommendations regarding a mesh system that would pair nice with 7 NUCs with AX211 card, nothing crazy regarding the bandwidth usage, probably once a night/week they ll do a backup to the urbackup server.
It will be used in a 170sqm house with 7-8 rooms, one floor.
I’ve been looking at some tplink, netgear, huawei, xiaomi variants, but can’t really decide which one to pick.
Cheers!
Are you planning to run OpenWrt on these devices, or are you buying a system that will use its stock firmware?
Also, will the nodes be using a wired or wireless backhaul?
At first, stock fw, but openwrt compatibility would be a plus.
Wireless.
In this case, you should probably seek recommendations from more general networking forums. This forum is focused on OpenWrt specific topics and hardware, which makes a general network equipment recommendation somewhat off-topic, and you may end up with advice that is focused more on what can run OpenWrt than what will best meet your needs.
If this is the priority, you're certainly in the right place. But if it is just a bonus, you should cast a wider net to get the best suggestions.
I've reached out to other forums as well, was interested in seeing if the recommendations kinda match, obviously I'd love the router to be wrt compatible, especially after seeing the bs manufacturers are on nowadays, like the paid cloud firewall tplink is doing.
On a OpenWRT perspective, if you will be using wireless as the backhaul, best to look for something that has tri-band and make one of the bands (5ghz preferrred) as the dedicated backhaul connection for the mesh setup. But this kind of routers are pricier than regular dual-band routers.
You can start there.
Snapshot supports the DL-WRX36. It's brand new so not heavily adopted and supported here yet. Doesn't look beginner friendly.
Linksys EA8450. You have to jump through some hoops to get this thing running - not a beginner friendly option IMO.
I have played around with mesh using wifi5 on the C7 v2 and to be honest some people just link them together as client AP pairs instead of using mesh as its easier and faster.
There is a bit of a learning curve to mesh compared to just scanning and joining as a client which anybody can do with a fresh install right out of the box in under 5 minutes easy.
Mesh is fun and works well but the simplicity and ease of use of client AP connections is also a serious consideration if your clients don't appreciate you playing around and testing the mesh constantly.
Have fun!