Ubiquiti AmpliFi Mesh Wi-Fi System
An elegant mesh network.
Not only does the Ubiquiti AmpliFi look cool, with its white cube design and a visual display of network speeds, but it’s also one of the most elegant mesh solutions available.
We looked at the Mesh Wi-Fi system, a kit that contain both the AmpliFi HD Mesh Router and a pair of AmpliFi HD Meshpoints — antennae/extenders that plug directly into a power socket and sit flush with the wall. You set up the router wherever your internet comes in, then place the two mesh points where you need to extend coverage. Both the router and the mesh point support 3x3 MIMO up to 1,300Mbps, and the router also contain four Gigabit Ethernet ports (but no usable USB ports).
For setup, a supplied app uses Bluetooth to talk to the router and mesh points, providing a load of speed and network diagnostic info. We really loved how easy it was to get running, although we’d be leery of using the HD Mesh Router as a primary router since it simply doesn’t have many of the more advanced tools found in other units (forget DLNA, USB storage, parental controls, QoS and the like). You can set it to bridged mode to turn off routing functions.
In addition to the testing directly to the router with no mesh points plugged in (the results listed in table), we also tested the network with a mesh point placed at 10m from the router and 5m from the test station. The results were good, but not great — there’s no dedicated back channel — at 28.3MB/s, less than half the speed of connecting directly to the router at 5m, ahead of directly connecting to the router at 15m.