Moving to newer routers from Airport Extremes

[akswun]

My house is wired with cat5/6 and have had 3 Airport Extremes on each floor of the house.
It has been great but one of the AE's has been acting up. I've opened it up and cleaned it and it worked for another few months.
That being said, I kind of want to move to Wifi6.
It seems something like the Orbi Tri-band might be the affordable option. I can find the 2 pack (router & Satellite) for $140.

That being said, can I just replace the ailing AE with the Orbi? And just leave the functioning Airport Expresses in place?
Or would it be better to utilize the Orbi Router as the main hub and then using the other Airport Expresses as Satellites?

Thanks for the help.

 

[Kottu]

Use Orbi set as your main routers and Airports as satellites. I have two Asus at home but keeping a Time Capsule as a separate network. To be true, I get much stable connection with TC than Asus with WIFI6. It's a pity that Apple stopped producing these.

 

[akswun]

Thanks for the suggestion.

My only other concern is having to set everything back up ie. the whole network in my house. If it was as easy as just adding the Orbi sattelites to my cat5/6 drops with my AE as the router, then it would be plug and play at that point. But then the question if the AE would be outdated in providing wired speeds to the orbi.
Ugh.. I agree, I wish Apple continued making AEs.

 

[Kottu]

AE is capable of Gigabit ethernet. So it depends how fast is your internet.

 

[mk313]

I’ll just add my $0.02. I was forced into the same situation very recently. My AirPort Extreme died on a Wednesday night and I had to use it for work Thursday morning. I spent a lot of time trying to fix it but couldn’t.

I ended up buying a set of Eeros off Amazon and 2 of those replaced 3 airports (in my setup). The best part was I was able to set up the WiFi network using the same names as my current network and guest network. And everything worked great. I don’t have to do anything with any devices to get them back on the network, everything just connected.

 

[akswun]

I’ll just add my $0.02. I was forced into the same situation very recently. My AirPort Extreme died on a Wednesday night and I had to use it for work Thursday morning. I spent a lot of time trying to fix it but couldn’t.

I ended up buying a set of weeks off Amazon and 2 of those replaced 3 airports (in my setup). The best part was I was able to set up the WiFi network using the same names as my current network and guest network. And everything worked great. I don’t have to do anything with any devices to get them back on the network, everything just connected.

Sorry, I'm guessing auto correct changed 'weeks'. Which wifi routers did you buy? Do/did you have an AE setup as your main router and just connected the new ones?

 

[mk313]

Sorry, I'm guessing auto correct changed 'weeks'. Which wifi routers did you buy? Do/did you have an AE setup as your main router and just connected the new ones?

Dang it, I bought Eero 6+ from amazon. I got rid of the airports entirely, and am now just using 2 of the eeros.

 

[ajr123]

If you go down the Orbi route, I wouldn't go for Tri-band given you're wired with ethernet - dual band will be fine (and cheaper) because you don't need the wireless backhaul.

Be aware that Orbi's configuration options are fairly limited, so you might want to look elsewhere - but I get that that is a bit off topic.

 

[akswun]

If you go down the Orbi route, I wouldn't go for Tri-band given you're wired with ethernet - dual band will be fine (and cheaper) because you don't need the wireless backhaul.

Be aware that Orbi's configuration options are fairly limited, so you might want to look elsewhere - but I get that that is a bit off topic.

I mean, going Tri-band might help future proof everything. And majority of the devices in my house rely on wifi. Mind you majority of the devices are running on the 2.5ghz band. But tri might help for the newer iphones that were using. I only mentioned Orbi as it seems cheap(er) than most. I'm pretty open to any brand as long as it plays nice without having to reset it every week.

 

[Fishrrman]

Another one you might consider:
TP Link "Deco" mesh router, I think they have a 3-band model.

I don't have one, but have read good reports from others...

 

[rezenclowd3]

For people needing multipe APs (access points), have something easy to setup and much more stable than the Netgear/TP-Link stuff, I would recommend Ubiquiti's unifi line of APs. It offers a single pane of glass for management and, yet can expand much more easily than the others.

It sounds like mesh would be a waste as you have a wired backhaul (mesh just means they have another radio to connect to the other APs instead of talking on the main radio like extenders do)

You would need their unifi controller, which can be self-hosted but that sounds to be out of your purvue. The U6 line would fulfill your needs and depending on clients uses up to a 2.5gbe connection for backhaul instead of 1gbe. IE lets say you have 4 computers sharing files over wifi connected to the same AP, the 1gbe connection is now a bottleneck at that AP.

It is straightforward to setup multiple SSIds, a guest SSID to give only internet access to but no internetwork communication.

With this you would still need a router. The routers in your Netgear/TP Links are just....there. Usually under powered and prone to crashes. I myself use PFSense which is a firewall/Router solution and TNSR for my 100bge lab, but that came with years of learning. You can use Ubiquities routers like the Dream Machine (router, potential firewall and the cloud key solftware built in) but I very much dislike Ubiquiti for non-flat networks, and their intrusion detection system us vastly underpowered.

Beyond Ubiquiti lies Ruckus/Cisco and many times requires a subscription, but is vastly superior to even Ubiquiti. Netgear/TP-link imo is a nightmare. I set it up the latter for clients letting them know to expect odd issues and they may need some $150/hr service calls....

GOOD networking takes compute. GREAT networking does it with custom chips at a hardware level instead of a software level so that the switching/routing can happen at wire speeds. (cough cough NOT Mikrotik)

TLDR: I would purchase some Ubiquiti U6 Pros (Enterprise if you run 2.5gbe), a cloud key, one of Ubiquiti's "gateways" (lite if running 1gb, max if running U6Pros with 2.5gbe) and a POE (power over ethernet) switch. This way you start with the entire single pane of glass for setup, but you are preparing yourself for a good home solution.

Your looking at $1400+ but for something that has a good base of support/knowledge to be found. (6 APs, cloud key, router, switch) You really are much too big of house to waste time with the costco stuff.

 

[rezenclowd3]

AE is capable of Gigabit ethernet. So it depends how fast is your internet.

Sorta. Speeds can be what you want.

You have a highway INTO and OUT of your house. That is 1 bottleneck. You also have a highway IN your house. IN your house you have Switches (bottlenecks), Routers (bottleneck) and APs (bottleneck), but your entire LAN (IN your house) may be many times quicker than the connection INTO AND OUT OF your house (WAN, your ISP)

You may need faster LAN for things like moving files between devices for video editing, coding etc. In my house, my backbone is 100gbe. From there it splits off onto 25gbe, 10gbe and 1gbe depending on client or bottleneck needs. For example I have one of my simple servers running ~15 virtual computers (VMs) and it uses 1 10gbe connection. Not often does it need that speed, but many times it does use over 1gbe.

Also, data only travels at one speed. It does not speed up or slow down. IE my 1gbe devices wont get bottlenecked at the 100gbe backbone, but that backbone DOES have to wait for the 1gbe to talk...which means it has to buffer the slower devices data as it waits. But I can then have 100gbe worth of data tossing around my network with out it slowing down.

And then.....to go to my outside world is a measly 1gbe into the home, 300Mb out of the home. Ugh. But rarely do I need that much speed into our out of the home. I could use it if it was offered though, but most of my data flies around INSIDE my home (LAN), not into or out of.