Looking to replace my old Netgear Orbi mesh wifi with an updated mesh system. My ISP (Cspire) offers a Plume Superpod WiFi 6 as their mesh system. Gets good reviews from with I’ve found but I know Wyze cameras can be a little picky sometimes. ANyone had good/bad experiences with Plume gear?
Not me. I have been through 5-6 different mesh routers over the past 2+ years. Currently have three and only one is idle. I’ve tried and am trying ASUS, Google Nest, and TP-Link. I tried and gave up on Wyze, eero, and Samsung. The problem with those three is a device limit that I could not live with.
But let’s talk about the good stuff. The ASUS had a feature that I liked. A backup ISP can be plugged in, so when the main failed, the router rolled over to the backup and I didn’t lose Internet. Cool. Useful. Saw it work once. So, the main is Spectrum and the fallback is Starlink. Cool. But I removed ASUS because at least once a week, during the day, it just restarts on its own. No explanation, no hint of a problem.
Now, let me say good things about TP-Link. Using the AXE5400 (Deco EX75) Its got a feature that I have not seen anywhere else. Reported this months ago here, and it still working. Inside the app, I can pick a device such as my Wyze camera and assign it to a specific node and it stay connected there. Still there. I selected those cams that are physically closer to that node and assigned them to that node and they stay put. I divideed my 18 cams up across the two nodes and I think it helped both connectivity and performance. This is the only router that I have seen that allows me to assign a device to a node. Love it.
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If your old Orbi mesh is RBR50, then I suggest to keep it as it is using the highly rated Qualcomm QCA9984 radio with a weaker CPU IPQ4019 (ARM A7 716MHz quadcore). It has one of the best AC wireless radio available.
I believe the Plume Superpod is using Broadcom’s SoC BCM6756 so the spec is ARM Cortex A7 at 1.7 GHz quadcore. If you don’t have any other 6GHz devices, then it is a side grade at best in my opinion.
It’s an RBR20 with 2 RBR 30 satellites. I think it’s about had it so I probably need to replace soon. It’s gotten to where it drops out briefly (1-2 min) several times a day. It usually reconnects again with no intervention, but occasionally I have to reboot the router. I’ve tried the fixes on the Netgear forums and a full reset bit nothing appear to work. Just started doing this a month or two ago. Worked great until then.
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In that case you can definitely try out Plume Superpod. I’ve looked over it, do you need to pay for any additional subscription for its features? Do you need to pay for any equipment rental fee or does your ISP cover it?
As per @Sam_Bam, you can check out TP-LINK Deco mesh as well. one particular model that looks pretty interesting is X55 Pro as it has 2 ports with 2.5Gbps each. Not even the higher end model XE75 Pro have that (it has only 1 2.5Gbps port + 2 regular gigabit port). This means you can ethernet backhaul 2.5Gbps with all the nodes and still have 1 more port left over to connect to your PC or another 2.5Gbps switch if you wish to expand your local network (assuming your PC ethernet is 2.5Gbps capable).
I also have some experience with Deco mesh, but with an older M5 model. They introduced several new features via firmware update such as IoT network which is basically allows you to broadcast another SSID, but it isn’t like Guest Network which is completely isolated. This means you can set it to 2.4GHz only for your IoT devices if they have trouble connecting to your main network. Another feature is called “Connection Preference” which you can force a device to connect to a specific node and specific Wi-Fi band. The only other brand I know which can do this is high-end ASUS’ mesh models, but they are very expensive.
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Out of curiosity, What device limit did you find with the Eero mesh? I have the Eero 6 pro along with an Eero pro and an additional beacon and have over 85 devices with no issues at all.
I had the eero 6 pro. Its 75 device limit PER node gave me the problem. I like everything else about them, but when I hit 75, there was no feature to push or designate a device to another less used node. As you know you can see where they connect, and I found IoT devices to drop offline and would not come back up, because they wanted to connect to the main. I deleted and re-added the subs twice trying to test if it was just ghost connections or a bad setup. You are lucky some of yours are rolling over to the next node. I had 145 devices on my three node eero net. Gave up.
Ah, that makes sense. The newer ones handle more devices. I think the pro 6E does 100 devices and the new Eero 7 Max does 200.
I guess I never ran into problems with my current setup because my devices self-divided between the other Eero devices and none ever hit 75 individually. I agree it would be nice to lock a device to a specific Eero, although I haven’t had any connection issues as is. I wonder if the devices that I gave a static IP address to get locked to an Eero?
I agree. I do link this feature on my TP-Link. My cams are stationary, unlike a Wyze car cam.
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