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Comment by dpark | Hacker News Reader

In bigger homes your best bet is to find a way to run Ethernet. My experience with mesh was mediocre to bad and I feel like that’s what I hear from everyone else who tries it.

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It really is, but you will still want wifi, so you need a team of internet connected wifi points with central control, which play nicely with each other. I have use Ubiquiti in the past. Is there an open source version of what they do?

I switched to ubiquiti because it just works.

GL.iNet is more open (they run an OpenWRT fork that they open source with a proprietary GUI on top). They have a beta for a mesh system on top of that: https://www.gl-inet.com/en-us/pages/mesh . I haven't tried the mesh, but I have had very good experiences with a few of their routers and they are what I recommend to friends.

Ubiquiti mesh stuff works very well and is an overall polished experience. Supposedly their APs are at least distantly descended from OpenWRT but they are not open source. Their platform is pretty open in terms of integrating with other stuff and not locking you in, at least.

Running ethernet over the whole home is an expensive job, may not even be realistic depending on the home's construction, and definitely isn't possible if you're renting. It's not perfect and not as good as ethernet for sure, but it's better than using a single router.

+1 I put as much as I can on wired ethernet. The WiFi is mostly for laptops & phones. I have a couple of APs (OpenWRT) that aren't meshed but I run 802.11r on them.

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