Decided to use the Amazon sale to fix the spotty wifi experience in my work area.

Problem statement: desktop is ~40 feet and 2 solid concrete walls away from the router.

Despite using a wifi repeater in my room, and connecting it to the desktop over LAN, my 150 mbps connection (at source) degrades to ~20mbps w/8ms latency.

Looked around during the sale for mesh wifi systems, and seriously considered the frighteningly expensive Netgear Orbi and TP-Link Deco systems.

Finally decided to take a chance on the D-Link Covr, which at Rs. 4499 was ~1/3 the price of other systems.

Installed this morning (including software updates, took around 15 minutes). And performance is through the roof!

This is while standing next to the master node, which uses the existing ACT box as a modem.

This is while sitting at my workstation, with my phone connected to the satellite node.

The Covr is not tri-band like the more high end versions of the Orbi and Deco. So it doesn't use a dedicated 5ghz channel for backhaul. Despite that it seems to be performing well so far.

These are initial tests of course, and with just 1 device connected. Let's see how it performs in the real world with FIL and kid each streaming HD video while I'm trying to do a multi-person video call.

For now I'm planning to keep the old wifi network running since it works just fine in most other parts of the house. And leave the Covr as an express lane only for work computers and phones. Will update this with real world experiences and stress tests in the next few days!