In particular, we’re fans of the BT Whole Home Wi-Fi, which is slightly cheaper at £164 for three units – or you might compare the tri-band Zyxel Multy U, now available in a three-node pack for a very reasonable £179. That’s quite affordable, but there are plenty of competing mesh systems in the same price bracket. The Deco P9 costs £170 for a three-node kit with a claimed coverage of 560m2. $164.95 Buy now TP-Link Deco P9 review: Price and competition Officially, the powerline components use the HomePlug AV2 standard and are rated at 1,000Mbits/sec but, in practice, that’s somewhat academic, as they don’t interoperate with other HomePlug devices and, if you’ve ever used powerline networking, you’ll know that the rated speeds bear zero relation to real-world performance. What makes the P9 special is that each station also has a built-in powerline networking adapter, which provides extra bandwidth for relaying traffic back and forth between nodes. Each unit contains only two antennae, enough for 2x2 MU-MIMO, and there’s no separate radio dedicated to backhaul traffic. Its Wi-Fi provision is fairly modest: there’s no support for next-generation 802.11ax connections (also known as Wi-Fi 6), and its 802.11ac capabilities are unambitious by modern standards, with rated speeds of 300Mbits/sec on the 2.4GHz band and 867Mbits/sec over 5GHz. The TP-Link Deco P9 is an 802.11ac wireless mesh network system, which can either replace your router or operate in access point mode to extend an existing router’s wireless network. READ NEXT: Best mesh Wi-Fi – the best way to extend your home's wireless network TP-Link Deco P9 review: What you need to know The question is, does it actually work, or are you better off with a conventional mesh product? It’s great to see a bit of fresh thinking in this market. Its three nodes can communicate wirelessly, but they also make use of powerline networking to provide additional backhaul bandwidth and potentially extend coverage to areas where a normal mesh platform couldn’t reach. The Deco P9 does things a bit differently.
There’s a considerable number of different mesh networking systems out there from various manufacturers but they all work in the same basic way, using a wireless “backhaul” connection to yoke multiple access points together.
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