These mesh systems work by replacing your current wifi. One of the units connects via a cable to the current router from your internet service provider (ISP), and then connects wirelessly to other units dotted about your home to blanket it with strong wifi.
In testing, dual-band wifi 6 mesh systems provided good coverage but not meaningfully increased speeds across the home compared with older, cheaper wifi 5 equivalents. I would recommend spending less on older wifi 5 kit rather than the new dual-band wifi 6 systems if your broadband speed is less than 200Mbps.
If your broadband speed is above 200Mbps, here are three of the best tri-band wifi 6 mesh systems available. Each were tested with 400Mbps broadband with more than 50 devices connected, including an Apple MacBook Air, iPhone 13 Pro and Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra with wifi 6, and a Microsoft Xbox Series X and Amazon Fire HD 10 Plus tablet with wifi 5, each used for testing speed and range.
The tall, white towers of the Linksys Velop do two things better than any other tested: high signal strength over long range and high speed from every satellite.
Velop covers most of the features that are table-stakes for routers, including a guest access option, port forwarding, speed testing, firewalls, automatic updates, device or video-call prioritisation for slower connections and other bits. It does not have a VPN built in for connecting to your home network while you are away, though.
Parental controls allow you to pause internet access manually or on a schedule and block specific sites on a device-by-device basis. Velop is also Apple HomeKit-enabled for improved security for some smart home devices.
The main unit has three gigabit ethernet ports and a socket for your modem, while the satellite units just have two ethernet ports. The network remained stable under heavy usage, but struggled to migrate laptops between the Orbi units as they were moved between rooms, requiring manually disconnecting and reconnecting to wifi to get the best connection.
The Orbi app was simple for setting up the system. It has a few more features than the Velop, such as a network map of your connected devices, but is slow and lacks wifi version and speed information for each device.
But wifi 6 speeds were the slowest of the group test, losing 10% compared with using ethernet on the main unit and dropping off significantly when connecting at the extremities of the house. Wifi 5 performance was also disappointing by comparison. Each unit is the same, but they only have two gigabit ethernet ports each, one of which needs to be used to connect to your modem on the main unit.
Coverage within the house was good, but the Eero struggled with concrete block walls and had much shorter range into the garden compared to the others. I also had annoying issues with Sonos speakers and a Sky Q set-top box, which required replacing a faulty Eero and software updates to fix. The Eero system caused interference for Xbox wireless audio through headphones connected to the joypad, too.
