I just got the Uniti Atom streamer and Uniti Core server to go into my living room. I have been instructed to pull a Cat 6 line from the router (in the den) to the living room, but the house is very contemporary (almost all sloped ceilings) and there are no attics to run cable in, and there are sliding doors along the interior path. So, a pretty long outdoor route will need to be used and a hole drilled (and waterproofed) into the stucco where the cable would enter the LR.
I had an AT&T (Internet service provider) come look and he said AT&T won’t penetrate the exterior wall, I would need to hire a low-voltage cabling specialist. He did show me a fairly new eero Max 7 mesh system which supports 4.3 Gbps wireless speed. Would this be fast enough to avoid the need to pull to Cat 6 cable?
Your Atom will work fine on a WiFi connection. You may not need the mesh system for that. However, the Core has no WiFi connectivity and needs to be physically attached to the network. You could place it near to the router and attach it with a short networking cable. (The Core does not need to be near to the Atom)
if you instal a mesh system, the Core would need to be connected physically to one of the mesh discs.
Thanks for noting this. So, if I put one of the mesh “discs” in the living room, near the equipment, it could be physically connected to the Core and I would not need to pull any Cat 6 from the den to the living room?
I was faced with a similar dilemma when I moved into my house as it was too much of a PITA to run Ethernet to the downstairs rumpus where my hi-fi is located. As I had a Google Nest mesh as part of the internet plan I signed up for I added another main Nest unit next to the system which has Ethernet out and ran a cable from that into a switch to feed my hi-fi and other items. Works just fine.
You will need the first disc to connect physically with the router using a cable. The second disc then connects wirelessly with the first disc. We use a total of 5 discs and that works very well in a house where we couldn’t get any reasonable coverage using the router. You may find you only need two or three discs in total.
In our case the Core is connected to one of the discs which is in our study.
We have other discs in strategic points around the house as the walls are very thick. The trick is to place the discs so they all show a good or excellent signal. We have been very happy with the mesh system after the frustration of limited coverage around the house. They are very simple to set up which surprised me!