Google WiFi System, 3-Pack - Router Replacement for Whole Home Coverage (NLS-1304-25) (Renewed)

I purchased a 3-puck Google Wifi system through Amazon to replace our more traditional wifi modem. The wifi in our house had become increasingly unreliable, with frequent dropped signals and interruptions in service. My wife works from home quite a bit, so reliable wifi is important. We live in a three story house (basement, main floor, upstairs) of about 3000 square feet, built around 1900. The lathe and plaster walls, and old school plumbing and wiring, make wifi and cell phone coverage a challenge. I placed one puck in the basement next to our cable router, one in the living room on the main floor, and one in the office upstairs. I attached an ethernet switch to the puck in the basement to accommodate our hard-wired devices. I did not wire the pucks themselves to one another. They are connecting to one another via wifi. The mesh system has greatly improved the performance of our wifi network. The internet speed for the computer in the office had typically run in the 25-30 Mbps range. It now runs 75-80 Mbps. We have not had the new system long enough to make a definitive assessment regarding long-term reliability. However, the performance so far has been great. Installation and setup was relatively easy, but I did have some issues. You do the setup through an app on your phone. There is no written documentation to speak of included with the units. The system would not recognize one of the pucks when I went to install it. I found a solution (resetting the puck using the reset button) after some searching on the internet. Once I identified the issue, and found instructions for resetting the puck, it installed without issue. The whole process took 60-90 minutes. If I had not needed to diagnose and reset the puck, the process would have been very easy, and would have taken no more than 20 minutes. All in all I am very pleased with this product, including the installation and setup process. You can get wifi modem's for a lot less. Given my experience to date, I believe this system is worth the extra money. I hope it proves to be reliable in the long run.

The first thing you need to know about these is that you should turn wifi off if you have an integrated modem/router. The reason is that the wifi coming from your modem can interfere with the extender but this hasn't been an issue for me.Each one comes with a CAT6 cable and are 2.4 and 5GHz capable. This one is a single node that I added to my 3-pack.You need to plan out how you're going to place these for optimum coverage and bandwidth. The initial one connects directly to your modem and then sends the signal out to every other node. I have a decently sized house with 3 floors and a detached garage with a finished second story where my office is. So I have my first node close to my router very close to my wall that faces by detached garage. The second is also on the same ground floor but a little bit further than halfway to the front door which is right about below my master bedroom. The third one sits on the ground in the closet of my master bedroom and the last one is naturally placed but as close to the wall facing my house as possible.In the Google Home app you can run a test when you select the main node (the one that's connected to your modem with the cable) that tests the connection of all the Nest Wifi nodes on your network. All the ones that matter to me have great connections but the master bedroom one only has a "good" connection. I'll need to probably move that one slightly around the room somewhere but it's not a big deal so far.Before getting these I had dead spots on my second floor and almost no wifi on my third floor. Now I might as well be next to my router just about anywhere in my house including my garage. I can't lose my wifi signal until I get into the middle of the street across from my house and even then there's spots where it'll connect still. I got full coverage from my cellar to the first, second, and third floor plus the entire garage.A trick for connecting devices that only work with 2.4GHz devices (since these don't let you disable 5G temporarily), is to move to the edges of your coverage where you start losing bars and you'll likely be connected on the 2.4GHz channel.Overall I have 4 of these in my 2800sqft house and it works great.

I love the simplicity of setup and setting you get to change using the app. There are great analytics using the app and I can easily see which devices are using how much data, and also prioritize certain devices during times of video games or watching videos to help prevent lagging or buffering. You can also group devices to easily turn off internet access to those groups all at one time. Overall great whole home wifi solution.Finally a wifi solution that is simple to setup, stays up to date and secure with automatics updates, solves my dead spots and expands my coverage while allowing me to easily run tests, get alerts, and setup guest access. I have this in my home, and have set it up in my parents home to finally solve their internet coverage issues. I have their house connected to my profile so I can even trouble shoot their internet issues from my app anywhere. Great solution for my "tech support" calls from my parents or in-laws.

As the other reviews state, this system is easy to install using the Home app. I'm using this with Starlink and disabled the Starlink router so I don't have double Nats or something (I'm a computer semi-literate). I wanted a mesh system mainly so I could use wifi calling with my phone and not run into any dead spots/dropped calls when walking around the house. This seems to take care of it and I'm sure if I were moving a laptop or tablet around to different locations, I'd still have great wifi coverage.I got the refurbished units because I'm cheap. The only way I could tell that the box had been opened was that one of the power cords didn't have the factory clips to keep it rolled up. Everything else looked brand new.Speeds were improved over the wifi extender that I had been using. All in all, very pleased.