My current plan is to pick up a 14 port Cisco small business router to place where all of my Ethernet drops terminate. That will replace the switch and router I use now, and it has dual wan fail-over capability. It supports USB LTE devices, so I can add one from Verizon to provide a backup.
My problem lies in choosing a MESH system that supports bridging mode to allow the Cisco to handle all the IP addressing, etc. The Linksys system seems to have the best reviews, but is the most expensive. It doesn't officially support "bridge" mode, but they have instructions on their forums as to how you can enable it. The TPLink system doesn't support bridging at all, so if I go that route then I'll have to make it my primary router and keep the 16 port switch I'm using now.
In your situation since you're just using the Google box as a modem you could easily go with any of the systems. If you could connect the "mini" devices in the mesh system to the main one via Ethernet I think you would be happy with the performance.
The 16 port RV325?
If so, I have its baby brother, the 4 port RV320, which is basically the same thing, but 4 ports instead of 16 and love it! Can’t recommend it enough. I have no need for a patch panel at home, so I like the rear facing Ethernet ports on the 320 as opposed to the front facing on the 325. Port 1 goes to my main computer, ports two and three each go to 8 port managed switches located in different parts of the house that feed other computers and home entertainment components and port four goes to my WAP.
I’ve had it for a little over two years now, and it’s been rock solid. I was worried looking at some of the reviews, but most of the reviews at the time I got mine were older, and firmware updates have fixed many of the issues people have complained about. The most recent one came out this past December, so it’s still being actively supported.
It has a TON of features for the money. I don’t allow social media access on my network, and was able to completely and more efficiently block Facebook, Twitter and a few others using the content filtering. It is much more effective than using similar features on more consumer level routers.
I have two site to site tunnels configured, one to a SonicWall security appliance at my real job, and one to a TP Link at my off the books gig and VPN performance has been flawless. VNC and RDP are very responsive, accessing remote network shares is also snappy. And unlike using VPN software, my internet speeds don’t drop by 2/3s. I had and still occasionally have a ton of issues using our $3000+ SonicWall in conjunction with $2000+ CheckPoint appliances at our satellite offices. Took me 3 minutes if that to set up the tunnel between the SonicWall my $200 Cisco and it never goes down. Having direct access to my NAS at home from work makes doing off site backup so much easier.
I’m also utilizing dual WAN feature in a failover capacity. WAN 1 is 120 x 12 cable (fastest I can get in my area) from Spectrum, WAN 2 is HughesNet Gen 4, at was is supposed to be 10 x 1. I’ve only had HughesNet since Thanksgiving and have not had a cable outage in the time I’ve had it, but when I pull the plug on the cable modem, or disable WAN 1 manually in the GUI, it takes the snap of the finger to switch to the satellite modem, it’s not as fast reverting back to the cable modem though. Not a real long time, maybe 5 seconds. I also have a USB mobile hot spot from Sprint, but the last time I checked it did not work with the router for USB failover
There’s a lot of features I don’t use. I don’t do anything with IPv6, I have no access rules set. Never touched anything related to QOS, with only two people in the house not many of my devices are using the internet simultaneously, I have no need to toy with it. I have Remote Management disabled most of the time, but enable it when I go on trips. No virtual LANs either.
Use the same access point at home, as the 10 I have at work. A Cisco 371, which at the time was the best unit from them before you got into the Aironet line. Not a fan of wifi at all. In my opinion it’s a mediocre technology at best, and is great for convenience but not so when it comes to reliability, stability and speed and I don’t have the will or time to dick around it. I want nothing to do with it. I live and work in rural areas, with no immediate neighbors, so there’s not much in the way of interference. At home the only devices that connect to my wifi are my printer, Google Home and Nest Protect. That’s it. I’ve owned and wasted a lot of money on three higher end tablets over the years that I used for a few weeks and never touched again. I don’t get cell phone reception in my house very often, but there’s nothing on my phone I’d want to do when I can do it easier and better on a real computer and I have unlimited data, so I don’t care about putting my phone on wifi. When I bring laptops from work to home to work on them I snap them into a docking station with Ethernet and a real monitor, mouse and keyboard.
At work, seven of the ten WAPs only exist to provide network access to our wifi time clocks that the factory employees use to punch in/out of that communicate the our Labor, Time & Attendance module for our erp. Without looking it up, I honestly do not even know what wifi mesh even means or why I would want it. But at work, I don’t hear many complains about our wifi. I have the 10 APs set up with 2.4 enabled/5 disabled. SSIDs are all the same, WPA2 passphrases all the same, each broadcasting on one channel higher than the next going in a clockwise direction. No wifi cluster controller in use, all independent APs, plugged into the closest switch. Employees with laptops can roam from one AP to other with no issue. Whether there is a momentary drop out as the leave the range of one, and enter the range of another, I have no idea.
At my off the books job, it’s a very small operation, they got a Ubiquiti cloud (I hate that word) based access point from their real IT guy and asked me to configure it. It was some hockey puck meets smoke detector looking thing. After two hours I gave up. I cannot even begin to comprehend why you would want something like that, and download some custom software, register an account and then it didn’t even work because of some Java issue. What’s wrong with assigning a static IP to a computer, using the default factory IP to access the GUI and either program it, or upload a config file and be done with it.
Sorry for the length, rant, and sort of hijacking of the thread.
