HOME NETWORKING: Upgrade Your Home Wireless Network to Orbi and See What You’ve Been Missing.

I tried a number of routers over the past several months, including an Asus RT series, an Apple Airport, and a few others, touted as offering broad coverage. I even tried some extenders, that were small devices that supposedly extended coverage throughout the home. I found some minor differences, but none that improved the performance on the second floor or reached the garage. And even on the first floor, the signal was mediocre because the WiFi needed to pass through a thick wooden floor. My conclusion was for this 2600 sq. ft. home, a single router was just not sufficient for good coverage where I needed it.

That’s when I decided to try one of the new generation of mesh router systems that seems to have proliferated over the past six months. Each consists of a basic unit placed near the modem and one or two additional satellite units that are placed throughout the home. The concept is that they communicate with each other to deliver the WiFi signal to the remote units, located closer to where you need the strong signal, with each remote broadcasting a WiFi signal as if it was the primary router.

Among the numerous makes are Google WiFi, Eero and Orbi. From my research and speaking with others who had tried all of them, I settled on Orbi, a new product from Netgear, one of the major router brands. It’s the product that’s received the top reviews from a majority of the technology sites.

I had similar troubles last year, and ended up creating my own “mesh” network out of a commerical-grade ethernet switch and three of Ubiquiti Networking’s Unifi wireless access points. Orbi’s gear does the same thing for about the same price, but is easier to set up. Either way, the result is the same: Strong WiFi throughout your house — and probably most of your property, too.