Like in many other homes, our wifi coverage is a bit patchy, but it’s mostly been OK, and the Vigor 2672, a wifi range extender and a couple of power line adaptors have been a just-about acceptable solution for a while, but it’s becoming increasingly apparent (Lockdown 3, The Revenge of Covid) that we need something that’s a bit more reliable.

If money was no object, I’d love to buy a full Ubiquiti mesh set up, but that ain’t going to happen! Instead I’ve been looking at eero, Tenda, Mercusys and devolo Magic 2.

The Mercusys are interesting purely because they’re so cheap – £80 for a 4 unit mesh. There’s no dedicated backhaul (wifi or ethernet), so the mesh itself will eat some of your available wifi bandwidth. Some of the reviews are a bit “meh”, but others are pretty positive. And even though the ethernet ports are only 100Mbps, for us it’s not really an issue as we can only get FTTC which runs at about 40Mbps.

That said, I am tempted by the Magic 2, purely because they can bridge my existing LAN, use the new G.hn power line specification as their backhaul and are also a mesh. At £270 for 3 units, they are on the pricey end of the spectrum, but the powerline backhaul means there’ll be more available wifi bandwidth plus they can be much further apart from each other, without worrying about wireless coverage.

The Tenda MW12-3 is a bit cheaper (currently reduced to £230 for a 3 unit setup) and has a dedicated third channel for its wifi backhaul.

What would you go for?