Google Nest Wifi Pro

Android integration and Wi-Fi 6E are plus points, but Google's latest mesh is a middling performer

- DARIEN GRAHAM-SMITH

PRICE 3-pack, £317 (£380 inc VAT) from store.google.com

You might have thought that Google had forgotten about its Nest Wifi home mesh system - it's fully three years since the second-generation update was released (see issue 309, p83). It was so long ago that the last release relied solely on the Wi-Fi 5 standard, or "802.11ac" as we were quaintly calling it at the time.

Now Google is getting with the times. The new Nest Wifi Pro leapfrogs Wi-Fi 6 entirely, jumping straight to the latest Wi-Fi 6E technology, with support for ultra-wide-bandwidth connections in the relatively interference-free 6GHz frequency range. And the price is alluring: the three-station kit costs a very reasonable £380 - a single unit is a distinctly less attractive £190 which is roughly the same as you'll pay for TP-Link's two-unit Deco XE75 system (see opposite).

It's a tentative implementation of Wi-Fi 6E, however. Google doesn't advertise the wireless speeds of the Nest Wifi Pro units, but a quick glance at Windows' networking diagnostics revealed connection rates of 1.2Gbits/sec on the 5GHz band and 2.4Gbits/sec over 6GHz not bad, but some way short of the 4.8Gbits/sec that the technology is capable of.

The Nest Wifi Pro units are also physically quite small, standing only 130mm tall.

That's great in terms of lifestyle chic, but it means the internal antennas are necessarily shorter than those in competing meshes. This has implications for signal strength - and therefore speed.