Thanks, smouty - although all that went way above my head sadly ☹️. I guess I need to find someone to set it up for me and/or talk me through it (for a fee of course!)

Exactly what do you have coming in - what service, what speed?

Do you have any wired infrastructure?

I have a 1GB Virgin Media Virgin connection; a 900mb Zen FTTP connection and an Andrews and Arnold 60mb FTTC connection. Not sure what you mean by wired infrastructure.

FIrst question has to be WHY? Why do you need three separate connection.

Why not get rid of two and keep either VM or Zen FTTP? Then run into a decent device such as a UDM Pro - interfaces direct to the ONT.

Get a 4G sim and base, connect that as a failover.

Then choose a set of Ubiquiti APs.

Sounds good - now to get someone to help me ‘unpack’ that and help me set it up 😊!

You forst task has to be consider rationalisation of your suppliers. You could save £50-60 month or maybe more. In a year you will have saved £600 or more and that will pay for a decent gateway and the WAPs.

Wired Infrastructure: Do you have cables running from where your courrent modem/hus is/are to where you may want WAPs?

Without wanting to sound arrogant - I can afford the separate isp services. That’s not the issue. I have had good reason to believe it’s worth it (many years experience where I have had one or the other fail - and sometimes for extended periods of time). My problem is how to extend/strengthen the puny Wi-Fi range of these routers (or at least one of them!)

As for wired infrastructure as in cables running to where I want the various APs - no I don’t currently have this.

Edited by kam67 (Sun 19-Feb-23 23:28:38)

In reply to a post by kam67:

Without wanting to sound arrogant - I can afford the separate isp services. That’s not the issue. I have had good reason to believe it’s worth it (many years experience where I have had one or the other fail - and sometimes for extended periods of time).

Without wishing to denigrate your previous experience, do you have an adequate mobile signal where you have your current set-up? If so, you could minimize your risk and do away with the complicated domestic networking problems you are trying to resolve by using only one of your existing terrestrial connections and having a mobile network fall back. If you have viable mobile signals from more than one operator that would give you as much if not more resilience than you have now. All you would need then is a router that has the option to add a sim card and use that as a fall-back. If both your terrestrial connection and your first choice mobile network is down you can still use other sim cards to try and maintain connection. If your router receives any sort of connection then any simple mesh or WiFi repeater solution would suffice.

Still unclear as to what having more than one broadband connection has to do with wanting help in setting up a mesh network to fix my poor Wi-Fi reception.

In reply to a post by kam67:

Still unclear as to what having more than one broadband connection has to do with wanting help in setting up a mesh network to fix my poor Wi-Fi reception.

By reducing the number of routers in circuit to one it enables you to set up a mesh system connecting to one point of entry, vastly reducing the complications. If you then use something like the BT mesh, in the minimal case you have one of the units wired into the router and other units plugged into power sockets round the house but no data wiring. The mesh units communicate with each other through WiFi. This will not maximise the speed available to your devices but will enable day-to-day use round the house in the least complicated or intrusive way.

That means your resilience is governed by the router that is the point of entry to your system but that router can have the resilience of an automatic switch to a mobile data connection if the terrestrial circuit dies and you can change the mobile connection by swapping out the sim. If you then want resilience at the hardware level, it will be cheaper to buy another router and put it in the cupboard just in case rather than paying monthly broadband fees to multiple providers each with their own hardware.