It might not have many special features or the highest throughput around, but for the asking price this three-unit Cudy mesh kit should be a serious contender for your home network upgrade.
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Design
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Performance
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Features
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Value
Sooner or later the default router your ISP gave, sold, or loaned to you isn’t going to cut it. Maybe that’s because your ISP upgraded your line’s speed and you want to take advantage of less buffering and faster downloads. Maybe there’s a specific setting or feature you need that the standard router doesn’t offer. Or it could simply be that you need more coverage.
After living with it for the better part of four months, we were a little surprised to learn that the three-pack Cudy M1300 mesh kit comes in at under R2,000. At that price, you can’t expect top-shelf features and high-end throughput. And if the line to your home is on the upper end of the offerings (500Mbps – 1,000Mbps) you’ll need to look elsewhere for something better equipped to handle that bandwidth.
But if you’re happy with your 50Mbps – 100Mbps line and don’t need a lot of premium features, this Cudy mesh kit will do for most homes. It is even available as a single unit or pack of two, to cater for different sized households.
Setting up and jacking in
You’re able to set up the Cudy M1300 mesh kit with the Cudy App (Android/iOS) or the ‘old-fashioned’ way via a web browser after connecting it to a PC. We tried both but had a better, more consistent experience plugging it into a PC. The app worked some of the time but we found going the PC route to be easier for dealing with any troubleshooting you may encounter (like fiddling with your device’s network settings if it has a static address).
Our review pack (sent to us by Duxbury Networking) contained three units, each with its own power adapter and Ethernet cable, but we didn’t notice any indication that one of the three was more special than the others. It turns out any of them can be configured as the main router with the other two acting as mesh satellites.
After the initial router setup, pairing the mesh satellites was rather straightforward with the option to connect them wirelessly, with an Ethernet cable, or a combination of both. All three units feature a 10/100/1,000Mbps WAN Port and a 10/100/1,000Mbps LAN Port. After you’ve set up the main router, both ports on the mesh satellites are supposed to act as LAN ports, although we didn’t get to test this feature.
It’s worth noting that a wireless backhaul has a strong chance of affecting the throughput of other devices connected wirelessly. That’s further exacerbated if there are walls in the way. To help matters, this Cudy system supports multi-band backhaul. Multiple walls will also affect how far a mesh system can reach. Cudy says an M1300 three-pack is suitable for roughly 400m² coverage but don’t expect that coverage if you live in a densely-designed multi-floored house.
Roaming around
We didn’t have a 400m² home to properly test that out but we did test the range of a single unit and how far you can get before the weak signal becomes a problem.
Just a note that our results were not obtained in a lab (but in a garden) and there could be many factors that mean your results may vary.
From less than one metre away and connected to the 5GHz band, a speed test on our Honor Magic6 Pro showed the max throughput our line speed allows, around 100Mbps. At roughly five metres from the unit, the speed test result was unchanged.
At fifteen metres away, and with a brick wall between us and the unit, the speed test result had dropped to just under 70Mbps. The signal of the 5GHz band was struggling a little on three bars but still managed to stream a 4K video on YouTube.
At over 25m away and through a wall, the 5GHz band was no longer available so we switched to the 2.4GHz band which gave a speed test result of just under 40Mbps. Our 4K YouTube video still played but now with a buffering pause at the start.
We ran out of straight-line space 30m away. At this point our connection on the 2.4GHz band was showing two bars of signal and a speed test returned a result of just over 20Mbps. In a proper home set-up, you would have a satellite set up before you got this far as there are likely more walls or floors to penetrate.
All in all, the Cudy M1300 mesh system performed about as well as we’d expect for a budget mesh system. We weren’t able to saturate either wireless band’s max throughput on our 100Mbps fibre line – 867Mbps for the 5GHz band and 300Mbps for the 2.4GHz band – but if you’re rocking a faster line you can probably afford to get something that supports Wi-Fi 6 (IEEE 802.11ax) as this system caps out at Wi-Fi 5 (IEEE 802.11ac).
Some bells and whistles
While the Cudy M1300 mesh system doesn’t support Wi-Fi 6, there are a host of other supported features, most of which are fairly common in consumer-grade gear.
Some of those include the ability to set up a guest network if you don’t trust your friends on your Wi-Fi, controls for parents to manage what the little ones have access to and when their devices are allowed to connect, support for dynamic DNS from over 15 providers, and built-in VPN client and server utilities that support all the main protocols.
There aren’t any features that set this Cudy M1300 mesh system apart from the competition but that’s probably fine for most folks considering the price tag.
Cudy M1300 mesh kit verdict
If you’re looking to expand your home network coverage and don’t feel like dealing with the hassles that often accompany Wi-Fi extenders, the Cudy M1300 AC1200 mesh kit is a great option. You won’t find features you can’t find on other devices and there are plenty of faster options out there, but good luck finding another three-unit system with a similar feature set for this price.
