I set up a $190 mesh Wi-Fi system at home, and it handled a dozen 4K video streams with ease

Tenda BE5100 3-Pack Mesh Wi-Fi System

pros and cons

Pros

• Makes mesh Wi-Fi easy to set up
• App offers pro-grade features, such as diagnostics
• Excellent hardware with Wi-Fi 7 support for a fraction of the price of some systems.

Cons

• Units feel a bit cheap and "plasticky."
• Spare satellite units retail for $100 each.

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There's nothing more frustrating than sitting on your couch or at your desk and noticing a limited Wi-Fi signal. I don't know about you, but I've been seen with my phone in my outstretched arm, doing something that looks like a weird yoga pose, trying to get a better signal. 

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Back in the day, the solution I'd fan back onto would be to set up a repeater or hook up another Wi-Fi router to spread the signal. Not a great solution because it didn't allow for a smooth handover between the different routers. I also dabbled with Wi-Fi extenders of all sorts. 

Yeah, they were mostly a waste of money. Even the ones that worked didn't work all that well. The extenders often made a good internet connection bad, and a mediocre connection terrible.

But there wasn't much of an alternative because, back then, I didn't have a Tenda BE5100 3-pack Mesh Wi-Fi System.

The mesh advantage

Mesh Wi-Fi brings the old idea of Wi-Fi extenders into the modern age. You have a main unit, and then satellites that you dot about the place. They all share the same Wi-Fi name, and the handoff between the different satellites as you move from room to room is smooth and seamless. 

One problem is that many of the mesh systems that I've tested are expensive. Some units have been $500 or more. They're good systems for sure, damn good, but that's a lot of money to put down.

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This cost is why I've been on the lookout for quality mesh systems that don't cost the earth. And this is exactly what the BE5100 (also called the ME6 Pro) offers. You get three units, each packed with five internal antennas and five independent high-power FEMs (Front-End Modules), offering super-fast connectivity capable of handling broadband speeds up to 2,000 Mbps and Wi-Fi speeds of 688 Mbps at 2.4 GHz and 4,323 Mbps at 5 GHz. 

And yes, for those who like to be at the cutting edge, this system is Wi-Fi 7 compatible, so you're future-proofed. For those with many devices at home, such as modern households that have embraced the Internet of Things, any network you build using the BE5100 can handle over 160 devices.

Yes, there are Ethernet ports on the back of the satellites.

Adrian Kingsley-Hughes/ZDNET

Not a numbers person? You can rest assured that this capability is more than enough for dozens of devices to stream videos, make video calls, back up files to NAS boxes, and doomscroll endless cat videos. 

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The average home or small office setup would be hard-pressed to saturate this network.  

Blanket coverage

The three units are enough to flood an area of 6,600 square feet, which is a pretty big home. I've tested this setup in an old stone house with walls up to three feet thick, and the three units could blanket the entire two-story home with excellent internet access, which the cheap router bundled with the broadband package failed at miserably. 

The Tenda app offers a lot of power and control over the network you create. 

Screenshot by Adrian Kingsley-Hughes/ZDNET

One drawback with many mesh systems is that they can be complicated to set up, and it's not long before they start asking you about things like IP addresses. While a small amount of setup is required with the BE5100, the Tenda app (iOS/Android) guides you through the process, making it as easy as possible. And if you mess up, you can always start again. 

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Once you set up one unit as your main unit, meshing the others is simply a case of pressing the mesh button for a few seconds and using the app to add the satellite to the network.

Simple. 

NFC and diagnostics

Another cool little feature of this system is that the kit comes with a tiny self-adhesive NFC tag. Once you've set up a network, you can use the Tenda app to write the network details to the tag, making it easy for others to connect to the network. I don't remember another router app having this feature.

The writable NFC tag is a nice touch.

Adrian Kingsley-Hughes/ZDNET

A sidenote here, though -- the app doesn't write-protect the tag (this is so you can rewrite it at a later date if the network settings change), so someone with ill intent could mess with the tag and rewrite it. My advice would be to use an app to password-protect the tag in a business setting to prevent it from being changed. 

Another feature of the system that I appreciate a lot is the app's diagnostics. For those times when something's broken, this feature always delivers. I threw some simulated errors at the network, and it picked them up and offered fixes.  

Performance-wise, the unit never missed a beat. My office broadband is a decent 150 Mbps fiber line, but that's nothing for a system like this. So I had to bring out the big guns -- my Starlink dish. When set up properly, this dish can achieve download speeds of 400 to 500 Mbps. 

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This is only a quarter of the 2,000 Mbps that the BE5100 can handle, but it's a decent load. The system had no problems handling this bandwidth and did a good job of distributing it among the network's devices. 

I loaded the network using 4K video streams from both Netflix and YouTube. I was able to get a dozen streams running simultaneously (my MacBook Pro was a champ at handling eight streams before Chrome's RAM usage went crazy), and I estimate I could have had another half a dozen streams going.

I then decided to see how the Wi-Fi would handle heavy usage, so I pushed as much data as I could across the test network I set up, by moving data to and from two of my Ugreen DH4300 4-bay NAS boxes and a Ugreen DXP8800 Plus. 

The DH4300 can only handle about 300 Mbps across a network each, which is just background noise, but the DXP8800 Plus is very capable and can handle a massive 20,000 Mbps of bandwidth across its two gigabit Ethernet ports. The Wi-Fi network had no problem moving a 30GB test file in under 100 seconds. I was thoroughly impressed with the results.

ZDNET's buying advice

Normally priced at $220, the Tenda BE5100 3-Pack Mesh Wi-Fi System is competitively priced. Right now, there's a deal on at Amazon where you can pick up a three-pack system for $190. If you've got a smaller space to cover with signal, there's a 2-pack on offer for $140, good for up to 4,600 square feet. If you don't need three units, there's no point paying for them (but if you need to add another, that'll be $100, so don't make the wrong choice).