Linksys Atlas Pro 6 Velop Dual Band Whole Home Mesh WiFi 6
Linksys Atlas Pro 6 Velop Dual Band Whole Home Mesh WiFi 6 System (AX5400) – WiFi Router, Extender, Booster with up to 8100 sq ft / 750 sqm Coverage, 4x Faster Speed for 90+ Devices – 3 Pack, White
| Dimensions: | 10.2 x 44.5 x 24.3 cm; 2.71 Kilograms |
| Model: | MX5503-KE |
| Manufacture: | Linksys |
| Dimensions: | 10.2 x 44.5 x 24.3 cm; 2.71 Kilograms |
| Origin: | Vietnam |
Does exactly as should and connects with our Fibrenest branded one to extend the mesh network.
Already had one left over from a previous home installation, so bought another to cover the new house with wi-fi. The original one is plugged into the Plusnet router downstairs and the other is upstairs, plugged in to an ethernet switch which my two desktops plug in to. Despite the modem <-> velop <-> wi-fi <-> velop <-> switch <-> desktop topology, I still max out my broadband speed of 72Mbs down and 18 up (from my desktops upstairs), and I get 100% uptime out of them too, no dropouts or loss of speed or anything.
The only downside is I had to reconfigure the old one to my new network and it seems once configured, they like to remain configured! It was quite an ordeal to reconfigure the old one, whereas the new one took about 30 seconds.
Well worth the effort… to get maximum broadband speed upstairs with no cables and total wi-fi coverage in the house is awesome!
The Linksys has a considerably larger footprint than the Hub, but it fit comfortably on the same shelf in the sitting room. The second one I placed in the family room (kitchen extension) behind a TV for the time being.
The Setup:
I downloaded the Linksys APP
I placed the Hub 3.0 into modem mode and turned on the Node in the sitting room as the instructions on the APP asked.
I used the old 3.0 SSID and Password so everything would reconnect without problems.
After the first Node connected, I selected the second node on the APP and followed the instructions.
Setup took a few minutes and went without issue. My Amazon items reconnected and all my other home automation worked right away.
The kit is literally only active a few minutes, so I am yet to properly test it. I did login on the browser and could see whatever was connected to the network and which Node they were connected to, including signal strength. I setup the guest account and password too, which will keep people out of the main network. I like that I can set downtime limits for any device connected, so no late night Wi-Fi for the kids if I so choose. The one negative I can say is the browser crashed out on me several times, so was a bit frustrating when I tried to change settings.
I will report back if I experience the same or new issues as I had with the Hub 3.0.
Just signed up to community fibre and they use these exact kits. To get a multi room kit with CF it costs an extra 10 to ensure Wi-Fi in every room. I plan to stay with them for 2 years so I bought these to extend the reach all around my house. 1 unit they give covered practically all of my house but it was slower upstairs now with 3 I have good coverage even in the garden.
Set up is really easy on the app. You just choose add to current network and after 3 mins it’s connected. No technical knowledge needed.
Easy to set up (plug in and set up one at a time) and have made our wifi consistent across the house. Nothing very standout but comparatively well priced. No complaints.
Excellent WiFi with the new Linksys Atlas Pro 6 Velop Dual Band Whole Home Mesh WiFi 6 System (AX5400) – WiFi Router.
We have had the Linksy Velop 5 unit for the last 6 years and were very happy with its use and performance but following some alterations to our house / structure / layout we decided to upgrade to the WiFi 6 System to improve reception in certain parts of the house, which the new system has done – we are very happy with it.
To set up, you download a Linksys app on your phone (I needed to do that anyway to manage the node supplied by the ISP). The app has an area for adding a node to the network, so I went into that. Everything went smoothly – a lot of button pressing, light flashing, and waiting – until the app tells you ‘Now connect to your new network’ – Wait a minute, I haven’t created a new network, I’ve just extended the old one! Well that’s tough, you can’t proceed until you connect to a network that doesn’t exist! So I reset everything and went through the whole rigmarole again. No dice. Exactly the same. I was thinking of sending it back for a refund, but decided to persevere. I found the Linksys support website, and that had a little chat area. Usually, these give automatic replies which are completely useless, but here there was actually a human on the other end. He led me through a series of rituals, ending with one where you press the red reset button five times within five seconds (I had to check the calendar to make sure it wasn’t April). Eventually, all was well.
A good thing about this product is that it’s wall-mountable (although it’s difficult to get hold of the mounts) – so you can put it out of the way, rather than on the floor or taking up table space – but, the power cord is not that long, and if, say, you put it above a door frame, you’ll have a plug dangling half way up the wall.
The router has two ethernet ports – I could have done with another one, but the way everything comes out of the bottom of the router, there isn’t really room.
As a wifi router, this seems a lot better than the combined modem/router that you get from most ISPs. With an additional node, it’s much better than the BT mesh system I had before. I’d probably get another node if the set-up wasn’t so difficult.
I received the package 5 minutes ago and opened the seal – when I opened it, I saw a bluish stain on the front of the mesh router and a dead fly stuck onto the top of the mesh (where all the dirt in the holes are). Some dirt is stuck inside and can’t be cleaned out.
The mesh works for its intended use case very well – was just shocked at the unboxing experience.
Whilst this is an expensive mesh solution, it has worked perfectly so far and done exactly what it is intended for – creating a single network that covers our house. We have an old property with a newer extension and previous BT Home Hub had areas it would not reach, and we had to use two networks to get coverage downstairs, and upstairs was always extremely patchy.
The Linksys app worked really well and guided the set up using our Home Hub 4 as the modem. When plugging in the parent node, the app says use any port on your modem, but it actually has to be an ethernet port – the WAN port will not work. It just took a minute or two to connect, choose a new network name and it was a simple as that. The second node connected without a problem and the app helped check that the position upstairs was suitable. The third node for our extension has a wired connection, as we put in a Cat 5 cable during the extension build. Again, this was simple to set up – just switch on the node (close to the parent) and add it to the network as a wireless node. Move it to your desired location and use your Cat 5 cable to attach one of the the node’s ethernet ports to a parent node ethernet port. It’s a simple as that, as the system automatically will switch the new child node to wired set up. All 3 nodes now cover our 4 bed house and single story extension in a unified network, which is great for mobile wifi calling (very poor mobile network), shifting where you work, wireless printing etc. The speed of the wifi has noticeably improved with the tri-band too, which is a bonus, though it wasn’t that bad previously.
One final adjustment was to change the Home Hub configuration via the online Home Hub Manager to disable its wifi, just so there was no contention with two networks. It’s now just working purely as a modem and seems fine to do so.
Overall, very happy with the investment in this. It may be pricier than some, but so far no complaints at all.
Maybe at the end. The four-node Velop system is running like a dream. Five stars’ worth.
Support (by chat) has been very, very helpful indeed. Also five stars, all of them well earned.
Reviews I have read, and many online threads, mention that Velop systems have major issues recovering from power outage, with manual intervention needed every single time. I tested that out well and proper, because I can’t have that, and I’m happy to report that whatever devious ways of cutting power to some or all nodes I came up with, not once did it fail to recover (it could take a few minutes, but it always got there). Those reports were probably true at the time, but with the current firmware (as of 26/3/2021) there is no need to worry.
So why only four stars? The problem was that I needed support in the first place; most reviews (and certainly the advertising blurbs) wax lyrical about the ease of setting it all up. Well, maybe. But not for me. Getting there was a two day slog with the whole world seemingly conspiring against it ever working.
Features I love:
– Guest network. Two separate wireless networks can be chosen to work at the same time on the same devices. The normal one, with access to things like home automation (if you’re so inclined), network storage, network printers – and a totally separate guest network with internet access and no more. For the technically minded: separate SSID and password.
– Device prioritisation. Up to three devices can be assigned priority, meaning that they will always get bandwidth even if other devices are trying to consume everything (gamers, streamers). In fact, those three will always get what they want, the others getting the leftover scraps. (caveat: if you have very fast internet (gigabit) then there are quite a few reports online that this feature actually harms your setup – I can’t tell with my rural speeds).
– The whole ‘mesh’ idea. Multiple velop devices around the house, servicing the same network name (SSID). Or names (SSIDs), with a guest network set up. Not the pain of repeaters/extenders with their OWN network name, meaning you need to switch from one SSID to another when moving from the range of one to the next (always causing interruptions). Perfect.
– Never thought I’d say this, but control via the phone app works marvellously well. With all my interactions with the support team, I’ve seen that the more traditional wired connection to the router with a browser interface is (of course) also there for those who prefer it.
Features I don’t love so much:
– The status of every single velop device can be found in the app, which is great once that works. Until it does, the only thing you have to see what’s going on is one muticoloured LED. Four colours, meaning all different things, either solid on or blinking, again meaning different things. OK for some, Im sure. But, as so often, the colourblind (of which I’m an unproud member) are pretty much ignored. I cannot tell my purple from my blue, and I cannot tell amber or yellow from red. That can make for “interesting times”.
– Dimensions. Getting these things out of view is not as straightforward as with tiny, simple extenders. There’s quite a bit of volume to them. The footprint, being a square and not a rectangle, doesn’t help.
– Getting at the support. I’m slowly, in general, getting more used to support via chat. Twitter and facebook? No thanks. Phone? Then I have no record – too volatile. So I chose chat. A word of warning. There are two different paths to chat support – and I don’t remember them. But one works, and the other one doesn’t. If you are going this way, and you find yourself with a pop-up that automatically refreshes and shows you your number in the queue, then you’re fine. Stick with it. You’ll get help. If, however, you find yourself on a page that isn’t a popup, is mostly empty except for the reassuring remark that “we are connecting you to a support agent”, three circles pretending to show progress, and a cancel button – then forget it. Nothing ever happens after that.
– Not so much a feature, but a source of confusion. It took me long while to try to figure out the product identifiers, and I failed. AX, AC, MC, MX, WHW, VLP, magic numbers aplenty… a bit weird. They cover a combination of wifi standards, number of devices in the pack, and device speed/capability. The important things are the wireless standards. So ax/mx (aka WIFI 6) is more capable then ac/mc (WIFI 5) which in turn beats n (wifi 4) if you look up the standards. Want to know more? I don’t, but be my guest: https://www.networkworld.com/article/3238664/80211x-wi-fi-standards-and-speeds-explained.html . The magic numbers for multipacks don’t seem so magical at first glance. If you have an AC2200, the double pack is AC4400 and the triple pack AC6600. But just when you think something at least is logical, the AX4200 multipack is MX8400. Argh. This is where I went mad, then gave up.
Our existing wifi more or less worked, but was messy for us and (worse) for our guests – it’s a five guestroom B&B with our own living area below it, making a total of 8 bedrooms, a hallway, an office, two lounges and a kitchen to cover – over three floors. It’s an old house with plaster walls internally, thick stone outside and some of those inside as well. Not ideal for supplying with wifi. What we had was a (Billion) modem/router, and four wifi extenders strategically placed. That more or less covered the areas that needed coverage, but it could be flakey and the different SSIDs where a pain, while many admittedly less important areas got no coverage at all.
As we wanted to improve this significantly, we decided on a wifi 6 mesh system. The guest network feature gave us the final push towards the Velop. We thought that, if we were lucky, we might get away with just four devices, and if we were unlucky then more could be added easily. The least expensive way of getting four, at the time of buying, was not a three-pack and a single, but two two-packs.
In pleased anticipation, setup was begun. Phone (Android 9) at the ready for the app, first node (to be configured as the one wired to the modem) connected and powered on – the rest was supposed to take minutes. Hah. The phone app would not recognise the node, and as only the phone app was presented as a way to configuration, the only thing for it was to call for help – a support chat session. This was not a fast experience (an hour to get through the queue, and about two hours with the agent to get the node configured) but it was a good one. Very helpful and knowledgeable person on the other side. Many things happened (I lost track – but I have the transcript should I ever need it), but in the end, the phone could connect to the new internet SSID and read my internet mail, as could the laptop. All good. Thanked support, rang off, started the phone app for node configuration – and had a fit. It would not start. Gave up for the day, came back the next for a new support session. Hardly any time in the queue this time, and again a very good experience with a second agent. Phone app made to work, one secondary node added just to be on the safe side (this involved hitting the reset button on the mother node five times within five seconds – a little thing I hadn’t read anywhere, so maybe it helps somebody). It was another hour and a half on the chat page, but after that everything finally did work as advertised. I added the two remaining nodes in minutes. Unplugged them, then distributed them around the house. Started the app to monitor the network and saw TWO devices, not four! Don’t panic as I did. Those devices weren’t the nodes. They were the devices actually connected to the wifi: the laptop and phone… To look that the network components of the mesh system itself, you need to go to the menu, and find “Network Administration” pretty far down. That shows each of the four nodes. Unplug one, and it’ll nag (good). It also nags on detecting movement (not in the room, but of the device itself). However, it did that with no reason, so I shut those notifications off pretty quickly.
That’s about it. Happy with the result. Very unhappy with setup. Happy with support.
BUT, the two major downsides, if you already have a wi-fi network in your home, are (a) that you will probably have to turn off your existing network or else there will probably be some interference between the two affecting speeds and functionality (you turn off the wi-fi through the router app on your PC or device) (b) whether you do or do not turn off your existing wi-fi, nothing connected to your existing wi-fi will communicate with your new mesh Wi-Fi or anything connected to your new mesh wi-fi. So, you have two choices if you want to enable everything to work as one. First, disconnected every device from your old wi-fi and reconnect to the new mesh wifi one by one manually. That may be rather tedious and time-consuming depending on how many devices you need to reconnect. The second option is what I did. And what I am sure lots of other purchasers of this mesh system must do. After installing the system as per the excellent Linksys app, you connect a device (e.g phone or laptop) to the new network you have created, then go into settings> advanced settings and then change the connection mode from DCHP to bridge mode (I think this is called AP mode in other systems). Once this is done (it takes a while to reconfigure) what you then have created is one network with two names: the old name and the new one you have created. That means all your devices and connected things will continue to speak to each other as they did before but with the additional advantages of coverage that a mesh system gives. So the upside of bridge mode is that you do not need to reconnect all devices to the new network to ensure they with speak to each other. You can use which ever named network through the home you wish. BUT you lose all the extra functionality that the manufacturers advertise which I mention above. In effect therefore, it seems to me, not being in any way technically qualified, if you install this system (which looks pretty good) in bridge mode, in effect you are simply extending and deepening your existing network. It is in effect a large and expensive wi-fi extender which works in a much larger space than a conventional plug in wif-fi extender. To discover this I had to do a lot of Googling and puzzling. It is not explained very clearly in the documentation at all. Strange, since I expect that many of the customers will want to do just that. There is a good guide, by Linksys, for how to do this available by Googling: how do I put Velop into bridge mode? That is not mentioned in the documentation accompanying the kit.
All that said, I really liked the app and the installation though slow was largely trouble free. I used the hepline to ask some questions about the system and that was fairly good. UK users can ring 02 030 274 625 (not a number which was easily found).
One other important tip. Install all the nodes at the same time. Do not install one later. That is so the firmware is all updated at the same time.
So have now downgraded the review to 4 stars, not because the devices (I have 4) have become unstable or because the system is working less efficiently.
It is because I have had a niggling issue that I finally got around to calling support about, namely that when the internet service dies, the wifi dies. I mistakenly though this was a setting that I could fix with the right help, but no, it is designed in.
Linksys have decided for you that when the internet is down, you don’t need your home network, so you don’t need access to your home media server, your heating control system, your multi-room sound system, your security system, which is obviously 100% wrong.
This is an old problem that some router’s used to have that they wrapped themselves tightly around the upstream circuit, it wasn’t right 20 years ago, it isn’t right now and Linksys need to resolve it. Unfortunately, not much help for me, as I am too committed to the product, but if you are reading this, think about what you use the network for and if you don’t have nor plan to have anything that you will need without the internet, then buy the product it is great, however, if you do, then perhaps consider an alternative.
— Update January 2020 —
The deployment is now 18 months old.
All the Velops are stable and we have had no problems at all with the system, other than occasional calls to re-boot the Velops, often after the Virgin router has had an issue or the Virgin delivery has fallen over.
Virgin has recently upgraded the service to our area and while the throughput was impressive before, even over wifi from any of the Velops we are no getting consistently nearly 100mb throughput, with no noticeable deterioration no matter how many other people are connected and have even simulated multiple simultaneous large chunky downloads happening, so the ability for both Virgin and the Velops to deliver consistent performance is impressive!!
—
I have a complex setup at home, with large wired and wireless network:
– Virgin Media SuperHub 3 (latest version – replaced by Virgin Media 2 weeks before the original purchase, not this 4th device purchase) in modem mode, still providing DHCP services
– 200mb download, 10mb upload from Virgin
– 4 Velops (3 in the main house, 1 serving the office at the end of the garden – the 4th device purchased after I had proven the system worked)
– Linksys 16 port unmanaged hub connected directly to the parent Velop (the latter has the sole connection to the Virgin router)
– Linksys 8 port unmanaged hard wired to the above 16 port hub
The fact that the unmanaged hubs are Linksys is irrelevant and any unmanaged hubs would have worked.
Our house is Edwardian (1900-1910) so traditional UK build, 4 bedroom – very long rather than square This is actually important, as the Velop system is designed to have each device daisy chain to the next, but in our house the devices all connect to the parent node when using wifi (the parent node is the one connected to your ISP router) in the main house.
Setup was easy, but we had some issues, due to the size and complexity of the physical world, which I couldn’t wholly remove without the addition of the 16 port hub. Linksys support were brilliant in every respect and while the setup is very easy, some “funnies” do occur and we had to do it twice.
In wireless mode each Velop consistently provide 75-80mb download speeds.
These devices are now wired directly to the parent node (2 physically connected with RJ45 cables and 1 by a powerline adapter) and are now providing consistently 155-165mb download speeds, which is at the top end of the scale and the same as you will get from a device wireless connected to the parent node or your original ISP router (when it had wifi enabled if you are getting a service similar to the Virgin service we have). Note that these figures are not based on what the Linksys app, which measures from the parent node and not the node you are connected to. They are independently done using the same app on my phone and laptop that I have been using for years, so I am pretty sure of the performance.
Stability has increased drastically for wireless connected devices right around the house. This is especially noticeable with the Sonos devices. Prior to this deployment we regularly had to stop and start wifi on our phones to reliably connect to certain Sonos devices (the ones lying between the various extenders we had were especially prone and if you moved from one room to another). Now this is a rarely happens. Note that this will also have been helped by the fact that the Sonos Connect that we have has been hard wired into the network. This will not only have helped this device (which was always a bit suspect), but this will be helping the Sonos proprietary wireless network that Sonos creates in your home. We also have a Honeywell heating zoning system and this was unhappy with the traditional 2.4ghz services from the extenders and regularly dropped out. This has no only happened once since deployment
So, personally, I think they are worth it and with 3 kids with countless devices and a love for streaming we are seeing nothing but stability. They have now been deployed for several weeks and since I completed the stabilization work on the physical network, we have only had 1 Velop fall over and quick reboot of that device solved its issue.
So can only recommend the device
*Have now returned it, updated with reasons why below*
Let me preface this by saying that I know my way around technology, I know my spanning tree from from my VLAN’s, my preferred way to configure a router is via a command line, I’ve built Linux servers from source code (Linux From Scratch) and have been an IT specialist for over 20 years, in other words I generally know what I’m doing and am not usually beaten by technology.
These devices made me want to throw them at the wall and then put the remains back into the box and ship them back to Amazon.
The first node configured without a hitch, the app saw it, I configured it, the firmware updated, everything was good in the world.
The second node kept getting as far as having joined the network, then the app would say it was testing to see if the location was optimal, then the whole thing would finally fail and ask me to restart the process.
I tried again about 4 times, then I factory reset the second node and tried again, then I moved the node so that it was only about a foot away from the first node and tried again, every time I had the same issue.
Then I thought that maybe the second node was faulty and tried to configure the third node.
The third node did exactly the same and would fail when it was detecting if the location was optimal.
I then factory reset the third node and reconfigured it as if it was a brand new setup, this worked fine and allowed me to update the firmware.
I then factory reset it (thinking that now it had the latest firmware maybe that would fix the problems), this time it failed at roughly the same point but with a different message and the light on top was red.
I tried to add it again and then had the same issue.
I then tried turning off every node and restarting just the master node again.
This rebooted fine just as expected.
I then tried powering on the third node and adding it again, it worked!
I then moved the third node to it’s proper location and it still seemed to work.
I then tried to add the second node again and it again failed where it did the other times, however I did note the light on top was solid blue which the things I could find online said meant it was working fine.
At this time I was tired and frustrated and decided I would pick it up again in the morning.
Two hours later just before I was about to go to bed, on a whim I decided to check the Linksys app, and was surprised to see all the nodes were listed, all were shown as being updated to the latest firmware and all said they were working fine.
I’ve now done some tests and can say that the speed and coverage is awesome.
4K direct rip content streams perfectly from my plex server, I’m getting at least 200mbits from every device when testing my internet connection, local network transfers are blindingly fast, I’m getting no drop outs anywhere.
Basically, setting these devices up is one of the most frustrating technology experiences I’ve ever had, but once you actually get them working they are truly superb.
*Update 19/12/17*
Other than providing whole house WiFi, one of my other requirements was to be able to wire in certain devices such as my NAS for home media serving.
I kept noticing that may connections to my media server would keep disconnecting with no seeming reason, so on the assumption that maybe the node serving the top of the house was maybe having signal issues, I then purchased an additional two node Velop system so that I could place one node in the center of the house and use the other node at a future point. Unfortunately this didn’t make any difference, and infact, although initially the two furthest nodes would show as connected to the new mid point node, after a few hours they would go back to being connected to the master node.
After some more investigation, I kept noticing that the network connection on my media server would every now and then (a few times an hour) show “Link Disconnected” and then a minute or so later “Link Connected” on the Ethernet connection.
Thinking that maybe it was the ethernet cable, I switched it out for a brand new one with no difference. I then tried it connected to a gigabit managed switch, with no difference, I then swapped the satellite node with another one to see if maybe it was the node that was faulty, no difference.
I also noticed that once I disconnected the Ethernet connection from the Xbox in the living room from the node in there and configured it to just use the WiFi, suddenly the intermittent lags and drop outs in online games disappeared.
I spent about 5 hours on the phone with Linksys technical support and they could barely actually understand what the problem I was trying to convey was, let alone fix it.
In the end I was forced to return this product and have now installed a 3 node Netgear Orbi RK50. The Orbi isn’t as fast on the WiFi, but it was literally up and running in under 30 minutes and everything just works.
*Update 23/03/19*
After a friend of mine deploying a three node Velop system and swearing by it with the more recent firmware updates, when I moved recently I decide to give it another try.
It now is superb. I’ve deployed a four node mesh in my new home and it’s been working awesomely. Deployment was an ease, adding a repeater node out of range of the primary node worked without a hitch and the whole system flies.