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I tested the Deco M5's single-node performance at long range as well – to get a feel for how far you can get from the node at the edge of your network – and found that the Deco M5 performed well, matching BT Whole Home Wi-Fi. The BT Whole Home Wi-Fi system has superior specifications and delivers the best speeds in the same room. As should be clear from the performance figures in the charts below, the Deco M5 provides a strong Wi-Fi signal house-wide.Īs expected, its close-range performance figures aren't all that impressive. I installed the TP-Link Deco M5 at home and ran my usual close-range and long-range tests using the iperf3 command-line application.
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The app also gives you customisable content-based quality of service controls, allowing you to prioritise certain types of traffic, such as “streaming” or “gaming”. It’s as good as Google Wifi in this respect and is a great choice for parents who want to keep tabs on and control of their children’s internet access. It also has effective profile- and category-based parental controls that allow you to block the websites your kids can access by category, time accumulated and time of day, while allowing you to view the content you want to at the time you want to. What's different about the TP-Link Deco M5 is that it adds to its mesh networking capabilities with comprehensive parental controls and bundled, network-level antivirus. The Deco M5 kit consists of three of these “nodes”, one more than Google Wifi and the same number as included with BT’s kit, and it works in largely the same way – by hanging off one of the Ethernet ports on your existing router and extending an existing wireless network instead of replacing it. The TP-Link Deco M5 is the firm’s first mesh networking system and, just like Google Wifi and BT’s Whole Home Wi-Fi, it aims to improve wireless coverage around your home by using multiple boxes to bounce the wireless signal from one to the other, spreading it into former black spots and reducing the load on your router. TP-Link Deco M5 review: What you need to know It has quickly become one of our favourite cheap mesh Wi-Fi units, rivalling even the mighty Google Wifi. The result is a mesh Wi-Fi system whose excellent performance and strong feature set belie its incredibly low price. TP-Link has regularly topped the list of our favourite wireless routers at Expert Reviews in the past few years, but with mesh networking gaining ground over traditional methods of strengthening your home Wi-Fi coverage, it’s having to change tack.