LinksysVelop MX5300 Tri-Band Whole Home Mesh WiFi 6 System (AX5300) WiFi Router, Extender & Booster up to 3000 sq ft, 4x Faster Speed for 50+ Devices with MU-MIMO & Parental Controls - 1 Pack, White

It’s a shame Amazon lumps together all the different Velop models for review as they vary immensely in speed and reliability. The old ones supplied to me initially by Gigaclear were not good at all, and I decided to upgrade to the MX4200 Triband bought directly from Amazon. GC have their own version of this that they put out with 900 contracts, and my comments are on the generic Linksys 4200 units. Apart from some glitches when GC enabled IPv6 in March 2025, they have been excellent, with contract speeds on a wired connection direct to the parent router, close to it on wifi near the parent, and still fast on the child of a child working outside on wifi. I’ve just had some issues in spring 2025 since Gigaclear turned on IPv6 but that seems to be sorted now with some manual DNS entries. My set up has not needed any wired Ethernet bridging despite being deployed over a long length in an old stone house with thick internal walls.

Joined Community Fibre start of 2025 and wanted to improve signal around the house. The Internet provider sent their own linksys router, the signal was great on the floor it's on for the speed I'm getting (about 800mb). But once I change floors it drops to about 200-300mb.Buying this router as a child node made a great difference. Firstly it was relatively easy to set up with the other linksys router via the app. Secondly I was able to place this downstaires, away from the main router and was able to get the same speed on wifi as I did if I was in the same room as the main router. The node comes with ethernet ports which I connected my media devices to like my PlayStation and saw a massive jump in download speed.

Signal strength with wifi with my devices is great it’s just the random dropouts (weak RSSI) and of course, it frustrates me a lot so now I wired it now with ethernet all around the house and it’s superb… the whole house has the same speed as my isp plan (1gbps)… so I recommend this with wired backhaul… if you’re looking for wireless backhaul (wifi only) then I suggest people to look at bigger and expensive wifi mesh routers that has a larger sq.ft coverage…

How I wish I had returned this kit in the Amazon return period! Long story short, I have tried everything the Linksys support forums suggests. I have tried many different configurations. In each case, I have been able to create a working system. When it's working it's not bad - it does what it's meant to do.BUT.But it doesn't keep on working. If I had a pound for each time my Internet has stopped and I've swivelled my chair to see a red light flashing on on one or more of my Velop nodes, I'd be well on my way to buying myself a trip on Blue Origin by now.Restarts happen completely randomly. Sometimes the system will go for several days without problems. Sometimes it'll restart twice in an hour. It doesn't seem to matter how much network bandwidth I'm using. I might be doing a big download, or it might blow up overnight. Worst of all, it might stop working in the middle of a video call. How humiliating is that, when you have to let the other parties know that, yes, my network has died again?How I wish I had sent this package back to Amazon while I still could. Instead, I'm out of pocket by over £100 and I'm not sure my conscience will let me try to flog it on an auction site.In case it's not obvious, I do not recommend this Velop system and I urge you not to waste your time and money on it. Original review follows:I have come close to returning this kit several times in the past couple of weeks since I bought it. Only my pride and a refusal to let difficulties defeat me has prevented me from doing so!Basically, this kit works. It does what it says it and it has extended my Wi-Fi very well. I'm getting coverage right to the end of my back garden, which I never saw before. Speed is satisfactory for the price. I'm getting full speed from my FTTC 80/20 VDSL Internet connection even after two hops. I'm very pleased that the system is using channel 106 in the 5GHz band, as most ISP-provided routers don't go there and there is only a small chance of contention with other networks.Setup is OK, but very slow. I think the nodes must be underpowered in the processor/memory area. They seem to take forever to boot and the process of initial linkage of the nodes (aka waiting for the red light to turn blue) is very protracted. Perhaps the firmware needs optimising.It will pay if you think about how you want to use the system before you start setup. By default, you will end up with a double-NAT arrangement and your home network will be in the 10.0.0.0/8 range. My own feeling is that you are better off in bridge mode - where the Velop acts as a Wireless Access Point for your existing router which you keep, turning off its Wi-Fi - or in router mode, where the parent node connects to a FTTP Ethernet socket or an xDSL modem and becomes your router. That's the mode I'm in, with a repurposed TP-Link router operating as a VDSL modem. Some ISPs will allow you to put their hubs into modem mode, other (such as BT) won't. In addition, BT users should note that, although they will want to turn off the Wi-Fi in their BT-provided hub, it has become much harder recently to turn off the shared Wi-Fi feature, which must be done by application to BT, so their hub will continue to transmit and occupy the increasingly crowded Wi-Fi spectrum.If you have used other Linksys routers you will recognise the web administration interface. My main gripe about it is that, although it provides the basics, there is no Expert mode to allow the more knowledgeable user to fine-tune the setup. For example, although it connects over IPv6 OK, there is no way to choose your own IPv6 DNS.Almost any change - however minor - in the setup results in the whole system restarting itself, which takes several minutes. Sometimes it will restart at random, typically when accessing the web-based interface or when starting a big file transfer. The DHCP table seems to get corrupted easily. If this product were immature and new on the market this would be understandable, but Linksys have been selling the Velop system for several years and it really ought to be fully stable by now.A bit of network peeking (using Pi-Hole) reveals that the Velop system phones home every three minutes. Personally I'm not too bothered by this, but some users might want to take action to block these calls.Linksys provide a system management app for phones and tablets. It duplicates some, but not all, of the web admin interface. It is essential for system setup, so you will need an Android or iPhone to hand.This low-end member of the Velop family is competitively priced at present and it is possible - with some frustration - to get it working satisfactorily. But if you want more control, or more power, it might be worth checking out other offerings in the mesh Wi-Fi marketplace. There are plenty of them!