Can you mix and match mesh networking hardware?

Mesh networks are an increasingly popular solution to the Wi-Fi demands of modern homes. You might be curious to know if you can mix and match different hardware devices, be it different models from the same manufacturer or even devices from different manufacturers. This is what you need to know.

Why mix and match?

Why even consider mixing and matching? Maybe you found a good sale, a friend is upgrading and willing to pass you some networking gear, or you just want to expand coverage a bit and would like to buy less expensive hardware to get the job done. Or, maybe your old system has some software features, like easy-to-use parental controls, that you don’t want to lose.

Regardless of what motivated you to consider the project, let’s discuss when mixing and matching mesh networking hardware works, when it doesn’t, and the trade-offs you’ll make along the way.

The mixture from the same manufacturer is usually quite smooth

When it comes to mixing and matching hardware produced by the same manufacturer, you’re generally pretty safe, though it’s worth double-checking the fine print on the manufacturer’s website before making any purchases.

All eero hardware is fully backwards compatible, for example, as is the Google Nest WiFi gear. TP-Link’s popular Deco line is also backward compatible.

When mixing and matching hardware from the same manufacturer, there are a few things to keep in mind to make for a much smoother experience.

First, double check for any specific issues with mixing and matching hardware by consulting the support documentation for the manufacturer of your choice.

Although it’s less of an issue, sometimes you’ll run into a situation where keeping older hardware as part of the setup causes some of the newer equipment’s features to be downgraded or turned off altogether for compatibility reasons. If that’s the case, it might be worth retiring the old gear and upgrading to all new mesh nodes.

Second, make sure to update all firmware on all devices in your new setup, including the router node and all mesh nodes. Things are constantly evolving and you don’t want to deal with compatibility issues or poor communication from node to node due to old firmware. With updated firmware, you can often avoid the feature degradation issue just mentioned.

Third, always follow the manufacturer’s configuration recommendations when available, or if no specific guidelines are provided, structure your network with the newest mesh nodes serving as a router and in the most heavily used areas of the home with the newest nodes. old in the peripheral and in the less used areas.

For example, if you have an older eero system and buy a new package, use the newer eero nodes as the main router and in the central area of ​​your home, and then move the older eero nodes to the edges to provide coverage. in the yard, garage, or other less important areas. This ensures that newer hardware is doing most of the heavy lifting and older hardware is picking up the slack at the edges.

As long as the manufacturer supports cross-model and cross-generation compatibility, following these guidelines will give you a truly seamless experience when adding more mesh nodes to your home network.

Mixing manufacturers is a big headache

You can mix hardware from different manufacturers, but it’s a major hassle and comes with significant penalties in terms of ease of use and features.

If you wouldn’t describe yourself as a hobbyist network administrator, you probably won’t enjoy the experience very much and we recommend that you skip it and stick with hardware from the same manufacturer.

Why is it a hassle? Wi-Fi as a standard is very well defined, but that doesn’t translate to interoperability between mesh nodes from different vendors. They may all use the same Wi-Fi standards, broadly speaking, but the way they implement mesh communication within the closed system of a given vendor’s mesh networking ecosystem is not interoperable.

In 2018, the Wi-Fi Alliance, the organization in charge of the Wi-Fi standard, announced a new complementary standard called EasyMesh. In theory, EasyMesh will make it easy to mix and match mesh nodes from different manufacturers. In practice, as of this writing in mid-2022, five years have passed since the announcement and very few manufacturers have adopted EasyMesh in any significant way because they have almost no incentive to do so.

Between the different mesh standards and the almost nonexistent EasyMesh support, if you want to mix and match hardware, you can’t just plug a few Google Nest WiFi nodes into your existing eero system, or throw in some cheap TP-Link Deco units. somewhere to increase coverage.

At best, if the manufacturer in question would support it, it could turn the new mesh nodes into simple dumb access points, connected via an Ethernet backhaul to the existing mesh router.

Why might you take that approach? Let’s say you like features specific to the original mesh router platform, like strong parental controls or a particular bedtime lockout feature, that aren’t available on the newer system. You can keep the mesh node in place to serve as a router (and still provide whatever parental controls, or whatever, you need) while using the newer mesh nodes as access points to handle Wi-Fi.

But then again, it tends to get a bit messy and complicated. You’ll want to make sure you’re not running the newer mesh system as a separate network with its own router and DHCP assignment to avoid double NAT, a common problem when “stacking” routers, and other problems. Depending on the capabilities of your old system, you may or may not completely lose mesh functionality when switched to access point mode.

Unless you have a very pressing need to mix the systems, we really can’t recommend it. At that point, you’re better off just updating your router.