We have been on Dunedin's Vodafone gigabit plan up until the end of last year. ONT connects to an Orbi RBK50 (I think), so mesh with 2 satellites, and an unmanaged gigabit switch for LAN to assorted PCs, NAS, AppleTVs etc. At any one time there seems to be 30 or so devices on the network, about 50/50 wired vs wireless. Usual speeds were 900/450 wired and usually about 500/250 over wifi depending on device and location. All was good ;-)

With the death of the cheap Gigabit deal we went to Vodafone's Unlimited Fibre plan but there's been a lot of buffering and complaints from the family, even on wired e.g. AppleTV with Spark Sport... Speeds are about 300/150ish wired, which still seems pretty fast...

I assume I need to stump up for Fibre Max ($89/mo), and I see the package can come with a new modem or mesh system. I'm assuming there's no benefit to a new modem compared to the Orbi (which handles all the network addresses etc and is easy enough to manage)? And a relatively cheap ISP mesh network might be less effective than the expensive one I already have? I don't have a wifi 6 need as no devices to use. The house is big and built like a faraday cage so wifi can be a challenge and the mesh I have seems to cover 90% of the house really well, I have only found one dead spot which is downstairs in the loo the teenage kids use, so that's a feature not a bug as far as we are concerned! 😂

Any comments on VFs new modems or indeed costs? $89 seems about ballpark 

Thanks in advance for your thoughts

Cheers

b