Kogan AX1800 Wifi6 Mesh

I previously blogged about the difficulties in getting a good Wifi mesh network setup [1].

I bought the Kogan AX1800 Wifi6 Mesh with 3 nodes for $140, the price has now dropped to $130. It’s only Wifi 6 (not 6E which has the extra 6GHz frequency) because all the 6E ones were more expensive than I felt like paying.

I’ve got it running and it’s working really well. One of my laptops has a damaged wire connecting to it’s Wifi device which decreased the signal to a degree that I could usually only connect to wifi when in the computer room (and then walk with it to another room once connected). Now I can connect that laptop to wifi in any part of my home. I can now get decent wifi access in my car in front of my home which covers the important corner case of walking to my car and then immediately asking Google maps for directions. Previously my phone would be deciding whether to switch away from wifi due to poor signal and that would delay getting directions, now I get directions quickly on Google Maps.

I’ve done tests with the Speedtest.net Android app and now get speeds of about 52Mbit/17Mbit in all parts of my home which is limited only by the speed of my NBN connection (one of the many reasons for hating conservatives is giving us expensive slow Internet). As my main reason for buying the devices is for Internet access they have clearly met my reason for purchase and probably meet the requirements for most people as well. Getting that speed is not trivial, my neighbours have lots of Wifi APs and bandwidth is congested. My Kogan 4K Android TV now plays 4K Netflix without pausing even though it only supports 2.4GHz wifi, so having a wifi mesh node next to the TV seems to help it.

I did some tests with the Olive Tree FTP server on a Galaxy Note 9 phone running the stock Samsung Android and got over 10MByte (80Mbit) upload and 8Mbyte (64Mbit) download speeds. This might be limited by the Android app or might be limited by the older version of Android. But it still gives higher speeds than my home Internet connection and much higher speeds than I need from an Android device.

Running iperf on Linux laptops talking to a Linux workstation that’s wired to the main mesh node I get speeds of 27.5Mbit from an old laptop on 2.4GHz wifi, 398Mbit from a new Wifi5 laptop when near the main mesh node, and 91Mbit from the same laptop when at the far end of my home. So not as fast as I’d like but still acceptable speeds.

The claims about Wifi 6 vs Wifi 5 speeds are that 6 will be about 3* faster. That would be 20% faster than the Gigabit ethernet ports on the wifi nodes. So while 2.5Gbit ethernet on Wifi 6 APs would be a good feature to have it seems that it might provide a 20% benefit at some future time when I have laptops with Wifi 6. At this time all the devices with 2.5Gbit ethernet cost more than I wanted to pay so I’m happy with this. It will probably be quite a while before laptops with Wifi 6 are in the price range I feel like paying.

For Wifi 6E it seems that anything less than 2.5Gbit ethernet will be a significant bottleneck. But I expect that by the time I buy a Wifi 6E mesh they will all have 2.5Gbit ethernet as standard.

The configuration of this device was quite easy via the built in web pages, everything worked pretty much as I expected and I hardly had to look at the manual. The mesh nodes are supposed to connect to each other when you press hardware buttons but that didn’t work for me so I used the web admin page to tell them to connect which worked perfectly. The admin of this seemed to be about as good as it gets.

Conclusion

The performance of this mesh hardware is quite decent. I can’t know for sure if it’s good or bad because performance really depends on what interference there is. But using this means that for me the Internet connection is now the main bottleneck for all parts of my home and I think it’s quite likely that most people in Australia who buy it will find the same result.

So for everyone in Australia who doesn’t have fiber to their home this seems like an ideal set of mesh hardware. It’s cheap, easy to setup, has no cloud stuff to break your configuration, gives quite adequate speed, and generally just does the job.

• [1] https://etbe.coker.com.au/2024/08/24/wifi-6e-mesh/