New Zealand has some of the fastest broadband Internet connections in the world. Not only that, they’re relatively affordable too. The first-world issue with the fast broadband connections has become how to make full use of them, from users' devices to the local area network (LAN) gear, because older stuff can’t keep up and needs an upgrade.
Internet service providers know this, but how much difference does it make? (Spoiler: a huge amount.)
To illustrate how much, let’s check out some newer gear. 2Degrees announced in September that it would ship the TP-Link Deco BE85 mesh Wi-Fi 7 access points with its HyperFibre broadband connections.
HyperFibre is Ultrafast Broadband (UFB) fibre, and 2degrees currently sells plans with 2 and 4 gigabits per second speeds, up and down the line. They had an 8 Gbps option as well, but that seems to be parked now.
Those speeds are great, and the 2degrees network which I’m using at home is dimensioned adequately to keep up with them. The bottleneck has been the Wi-Fi. Revisions 6 and 6E of the Wi-Fi standard are fairly quick. They’re not Hyperfibre quick though, and that’s changing this year as Wi-Fi 7 is arriving for both the wireless access points, and the hardware in devices themselves.
You have to have Wi-Fi 7 support at both ends of the wireless radio connection to make full use of the new technology, which is why it’ll take a while to filter down as people upgrade to newer gear.
The very fully-featured TP-Link Deco BE85
The Deco BE85 kit is high-end and the three access point kit that 2degrees sent retails for $2385 including GST at PB Technology.
It uses mesh Wi-Fi technology, which means you set up two or more access points, and they will then connect to each other.
Your devices (newer ones) are then able to connect to the one with the strongest signal, giving you a great wireless experience wherever you might be in the premises. The caveat is that you do need to pay attention to the advice from TP-Link on where to place the access points for best results, so read the good instructions. Area coverage for the BE85 system is given as 420m2 by TP-Link.
This is normally the point where I write at length about some installation glitch or the other, taking up precious time to resolve. There was none of that with the TP-Link Deco BE85s, thanks most likely to the Wi-Fi Alliance's EasyMesh feature.
The whole setup shebang was pretty much plug’em in and go, and much easier than what I experienced with Netgear for example. The smallest gotcha is that it might pay off to ask your provider to check your current UFB setup: I had to switch the BE85s from Router mode to Access Points for the installation to complete. Not a biggie, but it can be a bit confusing and your provider will help here.
Physically, the Deco BE85s are on the big side but with a nice round design and in unobtrusive white. They’re big because running multiple radios in the 2.4, 5 and 6 gigahertz Wi-Fi bands for high-speed data transmission, using beamforming for the multiple antennae (the BE85s have 12 streams) and the 10 gigabit Ethernet wired ports requires a goodly amount of computing power. The latter is provided by a quad-core processor.
There is a small LED at the bottom of the round access points that shines green when everything is copacetic and running; you can turn it off at night through the TP-Link smartphone app and the access point web page, which is excellent. All devices should have this feature because LED lights at night are a no-no.
What’s interesting is that the Deco BE85 units have a small factor pluggable (SFP+, who came up with that name?) optical networking ports as well as two 10 Gbps and two 2.5 Gbps high speed Ethernet ports. You can hook up a USB drive to BE85s for storage, and they can act as virtual private network (VPN) endpoints.
Sadly, Huawei never got back to me about their in-house optical fibre cabling which might have been good to try out with the BE85s for the connection from the UFB termination point and onwards.
I also investigated as to whether or not it’s possible to terminate the UFB optical signal in the main BE85 router. The idea was to get rid of devices in the network chain, like the Nokia residential gateway with an optical network terminal built in.
In brief, this is not possible because UFB is delivered as a bitstream service with an optical splitter that divides up the signal between 16 customers. The signal has to be encrypted, obviously, and the digital keys for that are sent automagically to the Chorus anointed router at the customer premises.
The Aginet smartphone app from TP-Link lets you manage the Deco BE85s and do most things and there's also the Deco app; I used the former. To get into the really nerdy detail and fine tune the access point, simply log into the devices built-in web based management and tweak away.
You can set up different network segments and play around with a raft of advanced settings.
TP-Link also provides the HomeShield set of security utilities that offers parental controls, anti-malware protection, device prioritisation (quality of service), and reporting. A subset of those features is available for free but for the full Monty, you need to take out a subscription unfortunately.
Wi-Fi 7 promised to be fast and consistent, and it is
Getting down to the nitty-gritty, as in why you’d want a Deco BE85 set up, the answer is simple: speed, and lots of it. I tested with the Microsoft Surface Laptop 7th Edition, which has what turned out to be really good Wi-Fi 7 hardware from Qualcomm.
Close to the main BE85 router, Windows 11 showed connect (line) speeds of 5-6 Gbps depending on the wireless mode. On a Wi-Fi connection, that’s really quite amazing and quicker than most wired connections.
In practice, it translated into around 3 Gbps up and downstream speeds against servers in New Zealand. What that means is that everything happens in an instant, with the connection being very responsive.
The secret sauce is a mix of advanced signal processing - the techie term is 4K quadrature amplitude modulation - and very wide radio channels, 160 and 320 megahertz in the uncongested 6 GHz Wi-Fi band that the Wi-Fi 7 standard 802.11be brings. Plus the processing power in the devices and of course, the fast Hyperfibre UFB connection (my one runs at 8/8 Gbps).
Add to that MLO which stands for Multi-Link Operation, and which combines the 2.4, 5 and 6 GHz channels so that you can use the three at the same time (this wasn’t possible in earlier Wi-Fi standard revisions) and you probably don’t need to think about using wired backhaul for the BE85 devices.
Normally, pulling an Ethernet cable (or passive optical fibre as per above) from the main router to the mesh satellites ensures a steady and fast experience. MLO seems to be doing that work rather well, and even at the end of the Wi-Fi mesh, it was easy to get 1 to 1.5 Gbps throughput, with connect speeds at over 2 Gbps.
Interestingly enough, I got better speeds using just the 6 GHz Wi-Fi signal than connecting to the MLO one. It was still pretty good on MLO but stay on 6 GHz and wide channels only for best performance. Furthermore, you can’t have the same “service set identifier” (SSID) which is what you name the access point. Apple devices in particular will warn you that they won’t be able to find other devices on the network, if you connect to the MLO signal. That’s because you’ll be on a different physical network than the other devices, so you might find that smartphones and wearables for example can’t find each other.
Wi-Fi 7 and powerful access points with multiple antennas like the BE85 can support heaps of devices which is important for small to medium-sized business use. Most people aren't aware of just how many different devices connect to their networks regularly.
That’s quite a bit of information to digest, but what it boils down to is: if you have Wi-Fi 7 support on the access points and the devices on the network, you’re in for a great wireless experience with the TP-Link BE85s. This is true too for Wi-Fi 6 and 6E devices, but to a lesser degree as they don’t support all the go-fast features of the newer standard.
The BE85 is said to support 22 Gbps of bandwidth, which is a bit confusing as you’ll never see any one of the wireless networks hit that kind of speed.
What TP-Link and other vendors do is to take the theoretical maximum for each wireless radio band, like this: 11520 Mbps (6 GHz) + 8640 Mbps (5 GHz)* + 1376 Mbps (2.4 GHz). That adds up to around 21.5 Gbps in total. Big figures sound better for marketing and all that.
Nevertheless, by including the TP-Link BE85 Wi-Fi 7 access points, 2degrees has made its Hyperfibre connections heaps more attractive as wireless systems make the most of the fast fibre connection. Also, they’re really good value in this context, as broadband add-ons.
6 Comments
Over the past 9 months or so of using the BE85, I’ve found that the device constantly sends packets to the home shield server and enrolling in the homeshield free trial can cause drastically decreased performance to various servers. I needed up having to factory reset mine and use a new tp-link account in order to get out of the free trial which was a pity as my Tapo and deco now no longer show on the same app. I could probably switch the deco back now but am too lazy to do it.
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