TP-Link Deco WiFi 6 Mesh System(Deco X20) – Covers up to 5800 Sq.Ft. , Replaces Wireless Routers and Extenders(3-Pack, 6 Ethernet Ports in total, supports Wired Ethernet Backhaul)

I was pretty out of date on my equipment. I had been using an Apple Timecapsule which has a wifi router. Unfortunately coverage was struggling with this. We have a 3 story home in a large city so there is a lot of interference. Our connectivity on 3rd floor was sketchy. So I wanted to add a mesh network and came across this.

The price was great in my opinion. Set up was super easy. I was up and running in under 10 minutes. We have a 1GBs internet connection and we really didn’t get to take advantage of it before due to the old wifi and bad coverage.

Prior to this mesh network, we only got great speeds on the first floor – where the modem is located. 2nd floor was decent and want to say would get about 150MBs. Third floor was bad. Areas had no connection but where we did, we were getting 10-30MBs which is awful.

After the mesh network we enjoy fast speeds everywhere. On 3rd floor we get 300MBs easily. We have one device per floor. Consistent access and speeds.

I also like the app and the ease of using it. I like how it tracks connections to wifi very easily. Alerts me when new devices join. This might be standard these days as I was using out of date equipment. I didn’t want to give up the time capsule. There might be better products at higher prices but for this price, I’m extremely happy with this purchase.

For years I've lived with pretty good WiFi from my network provider's Internet modem, with the exception that there were some dead zones in my house. In addition to that, it has dual-band 2.4GHz and 5.0GHz networks. When I encounter a Wifi dead zone with my phone, I would then have to manually try the 2.4GHz (slower) network, or switch the phone into 5G cellular mode. Frustrating – and not optimal. I looked into WiFi repeaters and extenders, but all the research to find a better working, and integrated, WiFi experience was leading me to build a Mesh Wifi network for my home. After watching lots of product reviews on-line, I finally decided on the Tp-link Deco X20 system. I purchased a 3-node solution. Node 1 is in my office and connected to my Internet modem. Node 2 in the living room with my home theater, and node 3 upstairs in my bedroom. Now I have decent and reliable Wifi signal throughout the house, with speeds ranging from 500mbps, to about 150mbps in the most distant areas. Set up was very easy. I chose to set up the X20 as a WiFi access point (AP mode), and not use the X20's router functions. This means that my Internet modem is still in charge of DHCP and assigning IP addresses to all devices downstream, and that all devices on my network can talk to each other, because they are all on the same subnet. In addition, the AP mode allows me to leave the original WiFi networks turned-on, and migrate these devices to the new mesh WiFi, as needed. Two important things to note about the Deco X20 system. First, the 2.4GHz and 5.0GHz signals are combined into one SSID. If switching is required, the Mesh Wifi does this seamlessly in the background – so you don't have manually switch WiFi networks on your device. Second, the nodes have two wired network ports. In my office, one of these ports is used to connect the node to my Internet modem. However, it is possible to use the other network port, and the two ports on the other two nodes, for devices that are sitting close to the node. For example, upstairs I have the Deco X20 node sitting next to a Roku Ultra video streaming device, which has a network port on the back of the unit. Rather than telling the Roku to use Wifi to connect to the mesh Wifi network, I can just connect a short network cable from my Roku to the Deco X20 node, and the Roku now thinks it has a wired LAN connection. Wiring a device directly to the node, where it is convenient to do so, should provide a faster connection, because there is one less network hop for the data to jump through, to get onto the network. In short, the Tp-link Deco X20 this is a very good product, easy to set up, and I recommend it as an affordable way to get started building a mesh WiFi.

I'm an IT geek / software developer for a living. I know all about how this stuff works and I wanted fast, but I didn't need crazy expensive for my home and some of these mesh systems are way overpriced IMHO. Reality is you can have all the latest crazy standards but once you get 20ft from the access point all bets are off and you'll never see the speeds you see quoted so you need to mix practical with price. There seem to be sooo many mesh system options these days, that I was overwhelmed, but after some consideration I thought I would just go for this one which seemed reasonably priced, but still offered most of the latest standards (and thus speed limits) and also had free returns!

In this case this config with 2 slave units was great for my ~4500 sq ft house, my previous single access point left some dead spots (like my Ring outside the house) just outside the range. But with this setup I can blanket the house and get pretty good speeds (>100-200Mb throughput) just about everywhere, and faster (400+ when you are reasonably close / line of sight to the access point)

It's important to remember when thinking about laying these out in your house what and where you need the speed. If you need speed inside your house (say you are always streaming movies from a pc to another device) or if you need speed from a device to the internet. The slave access points can only provide as much throughput back to the main access point (which is probably directly plugged into your router/internet) as good as their own wireless connection is to EACH OTHER. eg: if you put the slave access points 50ft away they might "only" be able to get like 20Mb back to the internet, as your devices is going from device -> slave access point ->* main access point (next to your router/internet) and the * connection is the weak link. What was the killer feature for me on these is you can actually use ethernet as a backbone for the slave access points. My house is pre-wired with ethernet so I was able to put the slave access points pretty far but every slave is hardwired back to the main access point and thus has 100% of the throughput back to the internet so no matter which access point you connect to in the house each access point is as fast as the main one so the access point to access point speed drop is a non-issue if you can set it up like this. DO THIS IF AT ALL POSSIBLE! It's like having 3 "full speed" access points strategically dropped through your house. It wasn't obvious I could do this from the (very basic) docs for setup that came with it, but a quick search through the online docs showed you could this and it's brain dead, just plug your home network into the port on the back. Extra bonus feature, you can use the 2nd port on the back as a local hardwired port so if you have a single PC or "device" (like an xbox or something) next to the access point you can still plug it in directly and get full hard-wired speed without needing to buy an extra switch in the middle. Note: If you don't use the 1st port for the backbone, then you get 2 ports for local devices that will get at least Access Point -> Access Point speeds without one more wifi hop needed.

I was pretty impressed with the iPhone app that you use to manage the setup, gone are the days of a webbrowser hitting a super slow admin page, the app is snappy and you can tweak all kinds of stuff. (favorite feature: One of the access points ended up in a kids room and they complained about the LED at night, guess what, turns out there's a "night mode" where it turns off the LED's during a timewindow in the settings pages!)

The "mesh" part works really good too, from the app you can see your device move from access point to access point and what devices are on which and stuff. Super handy for initial setup troubleshooting and geeking out over how it's all working.

I will admit, I was a little nervous since TP-Link is sort of a more bargain brand in my head, but I've had it going for about 8 weeks now in my house and it's been basically flawless. I'm sold, I'd TOTALLY buy this again or recommend it to a friend (or anyone reading this)!