Mesh WiFi for UK homes, honestly compared

/02 — THE COVERAGE NUMBERS ON THE BOX

Why “up to 6,500 sq ft” means very little here

Coverage claims are marketing, not measurement. There is no UK or EU standard test method behind them. They are generated in open-plan, line-of-sight conditions — which is to say, not in a British house.

You don’t have to take our word for it. Here is the same manufacturer, the same product code, two different websites:

• Netgear’s UK page claims 4,500 sq ft for the Orbi RBE373 three-pack.
• Netgear’s US page claims 6,000 sq ft for the identical three-pack.

Same box. Same manufacturer. Thirty-three per cent apart. That is the level of precision you are dealing with.

The physics is simple and unforgiving. Every 3 dB of loss halves the signal power; every 6 dB is like doubling the distance to the router. A solid Victorian brick wall can cost you tens of decibels — so one wall can be the equivalent of moving thirty times further away. And it gets worse the higher the frequency, which means the shiny 6 GHz band on a Wi-Fi 7 system is the worst of the three at getting through British masonry.

Our working rule: halve the manufacturer’s figure, or take a third of it, for a UK solid-wall house. That is our rule of thumb from doing this for years, not a measurement — and we’d rather label it honestly than dress it up. There is much more detail on why UK houses kill WiFi.

/04 — COMPARE THE MODELS

Every system we can stand behind, compared

Filter by budget, or by what actually matters — whether it has a 6 GHz radio, and whether the ports can keep up with a fast line. Every model here survived a fact-check against the manufacturer’s own UK pages in July 2026. Anything we could not verify was cut rather than guessed at, and we say so underneath.

Indicative UK street prices captured 22 July 2026 from the manufacturer’s UK store or a named UK retailer. Prices move constantly — we have seen the same box swing 30–40% in three months, so treat these as a guide and check before you buy. We don’t sell hardware and we earn nothing if you do.
Coverage figures are the manufacturer’s own claim, measured in open-plan, line-of-sight conditions. A UK solid-brick house typically achieves a fraction of it.

What we cut, and why. We are not recommending the Deco XE75: TP-Link’s own UK page flags it as being phased out and points buyers at the Deco X50 instead. We dropped a widely-repeated Tenda Nova MX3 price because we could not find it on any UK source and it wasn’t credible. We left the Linksys Velop Pro 7 out of the grid because the same three-pack was £399.99 from a marketplace seller and £639.95 sold by Amazon directly — that spread on identical stock tells you something. And we have not quoted a price for anything we could only find on eBay.

/06 — IS WI-FI 7 WORTH IT?

Wi-Fi 7 in 2026: worth paying for, or not?

Short version: buy Wi-Fi 7 for the 2.5 Gbps ports, not for the WiFi. If it costs about £20 more than the Wi-Fi 6 equivalent and brings faster ports, take it. If it costs £400 more, don’t.

The headline Wi-Fi 7 feature is the 320 MHz channel, and it exists only in the 6 GHz band. In the UK the licence-exempt lower 6 GHz band runs 5925–6425 MHz — 500 MHz in total — so in practice there is room for roughly one clean 320 MHz channel. Both ends have to be Wi-Fi 7 for any of it to happen.

The regulatory position, stated accurately: higher-power outdoor 6 GHz WiFi under automated frequency coordination has been decided by Ofcom, but it is not yet in force. Applications open on 1 September 2026 and the enabling regulations are expected in autumn 2026. Ofcom’s July 2026 statement also splits the upper band, prioritising 6425–6585 MHz for WiFi. If anyone tells you they can give you standard-power outdoor 6 GHz WiFi today, they are ahead of the law.

And the practical catch: 6 GHz is the worst of the three bands at getting through masonry. On 203 mm concrete the measured loss is about 55 dB at 5 GHz and 63 dB at 6 GHz. In British housing, Wi-Fi 6E and Wi-Fi 7 are same-room technologies. Selling a Wi-Fi 7 mesh as the fix for a stone cottage is selling the wrong solution.

Client devices are arriving — the iPhone 17 lists Wi-Fi 7 — but the tablets, televisions, printers and cameras in a real house are years behind, and they are what clog a network.

/08 — BUDGETS

What each budget actually buys you

• Under £100 — often one better router, and that is often the right answer. A capable Wi-Fi 6 router was around £68–£75 in July 2026. With the average usable English home at about 96 m², one modern router placed centrally and high covers most of it. This fixes “my ISP box is six years old and it lives behind the telly”. It does not fix a three-storey Victorian terrace.
• Under £100 — or spend nothing at all. If your provider offers a per-room guarantee, your first call is to them, not to a shop.
• £100–£200 — entry mesh, Wi-Fi 6, gigabit class. Real radios in the far corners, one network name, automatic roaming. It buys you coverage. It does not buy you more internet than your line delivers.
• £200–£400 — Wi-Fi 7, or a serious two-pack. The sweet spot for 900 Mbps+ full fibre — and again, the 2.5 GbE ports are usually the real reason to buy, not the Wi-Fi 7 badge.
• £400–£800 — tri-band flagship. You are buying a dedicated backhaul radio and fast ports. Honestly: for most UK homes on 150–500 Mbps, this tier buys bragging rights rather than a different experience.
• Above £800 is almost always the wrong shape of spend. Eight hundred pounds of mesh in an uncabled house will underperform about £250 of decent access point plus a professional Ethernet run. If you are at this budget, spend some of it on cable.

/10 — EXTENDERS & POWERLINE

Extenders, “boosters” and powerline — the honest truth

A single-radio extender halves your throughput before anything else goes wrong. It has to receive and re-transmit on the same channel and cannot do both at once. That is physics, not a design flaw. This is not just a consumer problem — Ubiquiti’s own professional guidance cites close to 50% loss per wireless hop and recommends no more than two hops.

Extenders also don’t create signal. Plug one in where the signal is already poor and you rebroadcast a poor signal. The correct place is roughly halfway — which is usually not where the dead spot is, which is why people are disappointed.

Priced honestly, a £27 extender is a perfectly reasonable £27 fix for one dead corner where you need email and a doorbell camera to work. It is not a network upgrade, and nobody should sell it to you as one.

The marketplace “WiFi boosters” are largely worthless. Consumer reporting on the brands sold as UltraXtend, SuperBoost, WiFiBoost and similar describes cheap single-band repeaters sold at £100+ that can be had for about £40 elsewhere, through rotating company names with no phone number and no real returns address. There is no such thing as a passive plug-in “signal amplifier”. If it has no aerials, no configuration and no meaningful power draw, it does nothing at all.

Powerline, fairly. For around £40, a wired link to one room without lifting a floorboard is a genuinely good deal — when it works. It works well when both adapters are on the same ring main, plugged directly into wall sockets, on reasonably modern wiring. It fails or crawls across different circuits, through extension leads and surge strips (the filtering strips the signal), on a garage with its own submain, and usually will not link at all across a separate consumer unit. Field experience is roughly 40–50% throughput loss across a second RCD.

One thing installers forget: powerline radiates across roughly 1.8–86 MHz on unshielded mains wiring. Don’t fit it for a radio amateur or a shortwave listener, or next door to one. If a neighbour reports new interference after you fit it, take it out.

Our rule: treat powerline as a £40 experiment with a no-quibble return, not a designed solution. Test it on the day. If it links below about 100 Mbps, take it out and price the cable.

/12 — OUR HONESTY LEDGER

What on this page is a claim, and what is a measurement

We think every page like this should have one of these. Most don’t.

• Every square-footage figure above is the manufacturer’s own claim, measured in open-plan conditions. The evidence that they are soft is on this page: the same Netgear three-pack is 4,500 sq ft on the UK site and 6,000 sq ft on the US one.
• Every “supports X devices” figure is a vendor lab claim. TP-Link themselves state that real capacity is generally less than the maximum.
• Our “halve or third the coverage claim” rule is our rule of thumb, not a measurement.
• The node-count planner is a rule of thumb built from measured attenuation data plus field experience. The only reliable method is a survey.
• The ~50% loss per wireless hop and the 40–50% powerline loss across a second RCD are typical field experience corroborated by vendor guidance, not standards figures.
• All prices were captured on 22 July 2026 and move constantly.

If any figure here is out of date or wrong, tell us and we will fix it. We would rather publish less than publish something we cannot stand behind.