LinksysVelop MX4200 Tri-Band Whole Home Mesh WiFi 6 System (AX4200) Router, Extender & Booster up to 3000 sq ft, 3.5x Faster Speed for 40+ Devices, 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.

This solved a problem which both Google nest pro and Amazon eero 7 failed to: extending wired LAN using WiFi backhaul I'm bridge mode (using atlas in bridge mode, creating the WiFi mesh, and using the LAN ports on the nodes to extend the wired network)

-- Update July 2020 --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 hubThe 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 deploymentSo, 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

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!