We test five of the best mesh Wi-fi systems to help you decide which option is best for your home

Struggling to get fast Wi-fi in all your rooms? A mesh network, with two or more units around the house, could be the answer

Most home broadband uses a single Wi-fi router, cabled to or integrated with the modem that connects to your landline. Mesh Wi-fi systems replace this with a base station plus one or more extra nodes. Generally, any mesh kit should work with any broadband. Here we’ve picked five of the best. All are based on 802.11ac Wi-fi; products for the new 802.11ax (aka Wi-fi 6) are still rare and expensive. To read our tests of other mesh options – as well as alternatives including Wi-fi extenders and powerline kits – see our 2019 Back Issue CD ( www.snipca. com/33711).

We’ve quoted the download speeds we got in rooms around our test house (results near the base unit would be faster), measured in megabytes per second (MB/S). Results in different houses will vary. If your main use of Wi-fi is to access your broadband, rather than copying files or streaming video between devices, performance will be limited by your broadband tariff as well as your Wi-fi. Multiplying by eight to convert megabytes to the megabits per second quoted by ISPS, 12.5MB/S would make full use of 100Mbps fibre, and all our tested products exceeded this – but you’ll want more headroom when using multiple devices. For comparison, speeds with a BT Smart Hub router alone fell as low as 4.4MB/S. Cheaper mesh options like the £60 Tenda Nova MW3 (£60 for three units from Amazon www.snipca. com/34741, pictured above) failed to improve on this, although they might help if your router gives up completely in a distant room.