Question AiMesh with XT9 and AX3000 ?

[TM1172]

Good afternoon everyone,

We're moving to a new house and I'm looking into home network setup. Our current house has an Asus RT-AX3000 as the main wifi router, with a TP-Link Deco M9 mesh system set up as wireless access points. The AX3000 has WiFi6 capability, but the Deco's are all WiFi5. Because of the way our current house is built, WiFi signals don't transit between rooms/floors very well, so we just have the mesh network broadcasting, and I've turned off the radio broadcast from the AX3000.

Our new house will be significantly larger, and I'm looking to set up a pair of Asus ZenWifi AX7800 XT9's to create an entirely WiFi6 network. I want to include the RT-AX3000 as a node in the mesh network. I like the router, and would rather not sell it.

The way I understand it, the XT9's have a single 2.4-ghz band and dual 5-ghz bands, one of which is used for wireless backhaul between nodes.

The RT-AX3000 has AIMesh compatibility, but no second 5-ghz band.

If I include the AX3000 in the network, is it going to affect the speed of all the nodes?

If I set one of the XT9's as the primary router, then run an ethernet backhaul to the AX-3000, would that allow the XT9's to still communicate via WiFi backhaul? Would you recommend running an ethernet backhaul to each node, if possible?

Thanks!

 

[bill001g]

You always want to run ethernet to the remote radios. This is the standard AP install that large enterprise customers have been doing since wifi was being installed almost 20 yrs ago. Any kind of wifi repeater greatly impact the performance and reliability of the signals.

Mesh is a marketing scam for the consumer market, no large business uses mesh. It is mostly just a wifi repeater that they renamed and made a bid easier to setup. The network always has been 1 single network. There really is no such thing as seamless roaming and the end devices not the network are in charge of the roaming so the so called "mesh" does nothing.

Wifi6 also turned out to be a extreme disappointment. Sure you could buy the fancy router that had huge numbers on them but most end devices did not support the features. You seldom see a end device that has more than 2 antenna (ie 2x2mimi). Many of the wifi6 device did not support the key feature of 160mhz radio bands because of the issue with radar avoidance. They only did 80mhz which makes them pretty much the same as 802.11ac(wifi5). So many people that bought fancy wifi6 routers showed no difference in performance.

You really want wifi6e if you are going to spend money, wifi5 stuff is still more than good enough. Only large desktops that download huge amounts of data need very fast network connections. Note wifi6e does you little good if you do not have end device that can use it.

But you want to use some kind of wired backhaul. Ethernet is best followed by moca. Even powerline networks tend to be better than a wifi repeater type of install. You should only use repeater/mesh systems when you have no other option.


Wifi6e for a while should help with the interfence but wifi7 is now on the market and it attempts to again hog all the bandwidth. We will soon have one house attempting to use all the bandwidth on the 6ghz radio and stomping on everyone else just like we do on 2.4 and 5