And I've just read there's a mandatory account + sign-in for these things?
What am I missing?! Just go buy a couple consumer routers and a spool of cat5e and you're done. If you're lazy, get a powerline device to bring connectivity to the remote router.
This is goofy!
The first thing people seem to go for are wifi repeaters, which seem to be terrible overall. I tried to setup/troubleshoot one at a friend's house and it sucked. When it did work, there was significantly more latency and the throughput seemed lower.
I've heard pretty good things about the power line devices and have suggested them in certain circumstances, they just don't seem to have caught on widely.
Mesh networks use a proprietary second network to address the problems with wifi repeaters. It sucks they're all proprietary, but from what I've heard most seem to work fairly well. I wish there were more with open standards and I'm not a fan of sign-ins.
Honestly, for most people upgrading their router to something relatively modern often extends the speed and range enough that other routers aren't needed.
The extra radio allows them to blow the pants off any repeater in terms of performance.
They also claim to do some network optimization, for example if you have a device that's constantly streaming Netflix it will be assigned appropriate QoS automatically.
Even if it has automatic security updates, you can bet that as soon as the thing's discontinued, the updates will be too...