Generation v.Next…
I started getting what I needed; Aruba AP acquired, and thought I’d start in the garage. Have a POE switch feed the AP mounted on the ceiling, with a directional antenna bridging the garage to the house. Aruba APs aren’t cheap,but I felt like if I wanted a truely banging network, you need to get banging gear. And even the Aruba APs have their own mesh technology, so I do feel that would have likely been a great setup. However…
Circumstances led me to finding a cheap/discount Eero 6 mesh network. Its not the pro model, but the model with 6 little white boxes. I figured I’d try a gamble, despite some 50-50 reviews where people either love it or hate it. As an IT person, I know I’d hate the simplicity of it; I love settings and being able to customize things a bit, but I also hate that my home network sucked so bad.
So I replaced the main router with the Eero setup, yet keeping the Asus repeater as I still needed it for a few devices and for office ethernet bridging. So far the native network REALLY woke up, and things were now nearly normal. FINALLY. FINALLY!!! I should have done this a year ago. I did have a beef though; the Eero only has one extra network jack, and I needed to connect a few devices in the living room to ethernet. A small nit pick but a valid one.
That repeater was still there though, and on the random times my laptop connected to the repeated network, and that was showing nearly 2 second ping times. Also using my computer in the office (wasn’t using it much) was terribly slow, like under 1Mb slow. Heh, I figured as much, so today I finally moved over a few devices to the main wifi network, and figured I’d just go buy a new bridge to link up the office, or just run ethernet already.
So today I decided I’d try a couple last things as experiments. My last wifi device on the repeated network was a temp sensor using the Homekidd ESP Homekit firmware, which means I’d have to get a ladder to take it down in the garage, and re-flash it as the wifi info is hard-coded. For now though, I turned off the breaker to shut it off, and lo and behold, the repeated WIFI started working better! Could that have been the issue all along??
Well, yes and no. It seemed to “relieve” the repeated network, but the repeater was still spotty with terrible ping times. Finally my last experiment was to change the repeater to bridge mode, to keep my ethernet connectivity in the office. If this didn’t work, the Asus would be junked, and probably still should be. However, changing the Asus to bridge mode brought full speed low-latency connectivity into the office. So far its been a few hours and I’m still getting sub 10ms ping times over WIFI from my wired connections. At this point, I’m returning the Aruba AP as I feel the Eero works good for now, and time will tell if I find that not to be the case.
See the last page for a summary and TLDR…