Tp-link Deco M5 Home Wi-fi served as three dishes

Dishing up Wi-fi

Supplied as a set of three dishes, Tp-link’s rival to BT Whole Home Wi-fi (see our review, Issue 496) bears an obvious resemblance. The plastic boxes are smaller (the diameter of a CD), but their chunky design is not as sleek. That said, they’re inoffensive, and once you’ve set them up you’ll probably forget all about them. Each box has two Gigabit Ethernet ports to connect PCS, consoles and printers without Wi-fi.

As with Whole Home and other ‘mesh Wi-fi’ products, the Deco M5 works by bouncing wireless signals around your home in such a way that every device trying to connect gets the best possible reception and speed, without you having to fiddle around with settings. We had the system up and running in 20 minutes, although you need an Apple or Android mobile device and it insists on connecting to Tp-link’s cloud service for setup – something we’d prefer to be optional for security and privacy reasons.

Technically, like Google Wifi it uses a ‘dedicated backhaul link’ between the dishes. This is basically a system that lets the dishes communicate with each other without affecting devices connected to them. Maximum ‘theoretical’ speeds are lower than BT’S, and this was confirmed in our tests – at least at close range. With BT Whole Home Wi-fi, we hit almost 100Mb/sec, while the Deco M5 only managed 68 – still a decent result, though also behind Google Wifi, at 73Mb/sec. Further away, using two dishes for a fair comparison with Google (which only provides two boxes as standard), the Deco M5 almost caught up to Whole Home Wi-fi, at just under 35Mb/sec, and beat Google Wifi, at 27.

Like Google, Tp-link also provides comprehensive parental controls to block users from accessing certain sites or going online at certain times. You can also choose to prioritise video streaming or gaming if those tasks need more than their fair share of bandwidth in a busy home. It can all be controlled from a neat phone and tablet app or from your PC.

Right now, we’d buy BT Whole Home Wi-fi because it’s £40 cheaper. But the Deco M5 is so good, and so well presented, that it comes a close second. We’ll have to wait and see if BT can sustain its cheaper prices, or if others can match it. But if you want faster and more reliable connections around your house, the time has definitely come to jump into mesh networking.

Quick to set up and compares well with rivals over long and short distances

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