Nest Wifi Mesh in multilevel home

[nsam]

Hi All,

I live in a two level house, with concrete separating the floors. I have my router setup on the second floor and a point close to the staircase. On the first floor, I have a point close to the stairs and another in the living room. The points on the first floor get very weak connections and I'm trying to see what options I have other than installing another point in the staircase. If I have an Ethernet access on the first floor, can I use another Nest Router to power the first floor, while stilling being in the same mesh network for me to manage all my Google Home devices under one "home"

Thanks. 

[MichaelP · Accepted solution]

Hello @nsam 

Concrete floors are definitely going to be a problem, especially for the 5GHz signal the mesh interconnect uses. But, adding more mesh points isn't necessarily going to solve this, either. I suspect the points on the first floor are managing to get a connection to the primary on the second floor – it's just a very weak connection. They will use this instead of going through multiple hops since the path selection policy is designed to favor fewer hops. 

I would definitely look into using Ethernet to get between the floors. Here's a support article on this with some details: https://support.google.com/googlenest/answer/7215624?hl=en 

But, the short version is that any wired secondary must be connected via Ethernet to the LAN port on the primary (so that it's on the same "inner" network as wireless mesh interconnect and any wired clients). You can build a switched network from that LAN port to connect multiple devices and remote locations (I have 5 small Ethernet switches in my network for example, with two wired secondaries hanging off of it).

One caveat, though, is that when you connect a secondary via Ethernet, it cannot carry mesh traffic for other mesh-only points/secondaries in the vicinity (though due to the fewest hops policy, it's unlikely it would do that anyway). So, in your case, I would probably deploy a wired secondary on the first floor and hope it covers the entire floor by itself. If it's not enough, then I'd place another wired secondary on the first floor to solve that problem. By the way, you can use the cheaper Google WiFi units as wired secondaries instead of Nest WiFi Router units. They have somewhat less capable radios, but most clients won't notice.

You can use some of your Nest WiFi Point units on the second floor, but you probably won't need that many – maybe one or two? Having too many can be a problem, so if you end up with more than you need, return them or sell them.

[nsam]

Thanks @MichaelP, this is very helpful. A few followups:

1. Is there anyway to change the path selection policy? 

2. Both floors are large, walls are very thick (brick and cement), and will require multiple access points. Given this and the fewest hops policy, maybe Google Nest is not the way to go, which is a bummer, coz I am trying to build my entire home automation using Google products. Running wires all around the house is not really practical for me as well. Do you recommend any other mesh routers? I need to have a mesh setup (i think), coz I will need to have all my Google Home automation devices on the same network. 

3. Related to #2 above, I would like to have my entire network go via a VPN provider. Seems like Google routers don't have first party support for VPNs. Do you recommend any mesh routers that support VPN? 

[MichaelP]

1. No – it's based on the 802.11s WiFi mesh standard implementation. There are reasons why it uses a fewest-hops policy, some of which still apply in fixed environments.

2. If the walls are also brick and cement, then you're going to need to run Ethernet to get acceptable coverage on both floors no matter what system you choose. Any of the mesh router solutions are going to struggle with an environment like that. You may be able to make Nest WiFi work, but only by wiring all the secondaries. I would probably pick a different non-mesh product that supports multiple access points instead (plenty of those should provide a common network name + password and bridge everything together just like Google/Nest WiFi does).

3. I don't have direct experience with other mesh solutions, but again, you're not going to be happy with anything that depends on a wireless interconnect when your walls and floors are brick and/or concrete.