However, it’s too lightweight to deliver top performance, even at medium range. If you simply want to extend a stable wireless connection around a medium-sized property, it provides everything you need in a nicely unobtrusive package. The Linksys Velop Dual-Band is easy to use and reasonably priced. And if you’re tempted to try to force a 5GHz connection, you’re out of luck, as the firmware doesn’t support band splitting. This provides better penetration but, as we saw, slower speeds. The reason became apparent once I delved into the technical details: the 5GHz signal from the Dual-Band nodes had proved too weak to project consistently through the walls in my home – a problem I hadn’t had with the larger units – and my test laptop had automatically fallen back to the slower 2.4GHz band.
MODEM VS ROUTER VELOP DOWNLOAD
And in the bathroom – always a tricky spot to reach, owing to a thick wall and a radio-baffling radiator – I got download speeds of just 5MB/sec, compared to 11MB/sec for the larger units. In the bedroom, I got just 7MB/sec, versus the original Velop’s 17MB/sec. Once I started roaming about the house, however, speeds fell precipitously.
MODEM VS ROUTER VELOP FULL
Things started pretty positively: in the living room, the Velop Dual-Band model gave me a perfectly respectable 13MB/sec – slower than the 17MB/sec I’d got from the regular Velop, but still enough bandwidth to get the full benefit of a 100Mbits/sec internet connection. Then, I tested how long it took to download a local set of 40 one-megabyte files in the living room, the upstairs bedroom and the bathroom beyond that. First, I situated the nodes throughout my home, locating one in the living room next to my modem, the second in the kitchen in the middle of the house, and the third in the utility room at the rear of the building. To find out how much difference this makes in practice, I put the Velop Dual-Band through my usual set of domestic tests. That means both client and backhaul traffic have to share the same channel, squeezing the available bandwidth. What’s more, while the Velop Dual-Band uses the same 867Mbits/sec 5GHz radios as the older model, there’s only one per node instead of two. The smaller nodes imply shrunken aerials and a weaker signal and that’s borne out by the fact that Linksys recommends this package for homes up to 4,500 square feet, while the original system can cover up to 6,000 square feet. We weren’t expecting the fun-sized Velop Dual-Band nodes to be as fast as the full-sized system. Image 5 of 8 Linksys Velop Dual-Band: Performance Once you’ve got things set up you can pretty much forget about the Velop: the three nodes appear as a single network, with the firmware automatically steering clients onto the strongest available connection from wherever they happen to be.
You might also choose to do this if you have a lot of wired clients, as each Velop unit only has two Gigabit Ethernet ports (and on the primary node one of these is taken up by the connection to your modem or router). In this case, you can also set up the Velop nodes as wireless access points (this may be necessary if your ISP router cannot be put in). It doesn’t have an ADSL modem built in, however, so you might need to keep using your existing router. It’s not the world’s most feature-packed router, but you can reserve IP addresses for specific devices, set up port forwarding for local services, blacklist specific websites and enforce scheduling for individual devices.
This can also be done through the app, or you can use the (rather sluggish) web portal. There are a few even cheaper options, though: the Tenda Nova MW6 is a mere £155 while the excellent BT Whole Home Wi-Fi system comes in at £200 – although that’s an extender system that works with your existing router, rather than replacing it.Īnother option is the £200 TP-Link Deco M5 in our tests, this wasn’t as fast as the BT system but it benefits from built-in antivirus and category-based web filtering.īy default, the Velop system replaces your existing router, so once the nodes are in place you may also want to spend some time configuring your home network. The Velop Dual-Band is competitively priced at £220 for a three-node mesh system. Linksys Velop Dual-Band review: Price and competition This means that you may still need to use your ISP-supplied router or replace it with a third-party modem. You can use it to extend any existing wireless network, although it’s worth noting from the outset that the Linksys Velop Dual-Band does not have a built-in ADSL modem. It does this by bouncing the signal from node to node, thus ensuring a strong signal wherever you might be. It comes in the form of three separate "nodes" (you can also buy a twin pack), is designed to replace or supplement your existing wireless router and spread a strong wireless signal around your house. BT Whole Home Wi-Fi review: A fully featured mesh Wi-Fi system
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