[SOLVED] Asus XT8 or Asus ET8?

[amriths]

Hey all, wanted to get your thoughts on these two routers.

First off a little bit about my needs, I have a 1000 down/30 up connection from my ISP (currently being heavily underutilized because of the very very old wireless router that I had laying around). My house is an older (~1960s) 2-storey detached home with an office in the attic (where the modem is). Running ethernet cable for a wired backhaul to a lower level would be prohibitively expensive. So I'm looking for a wireless backhaul mesh wifi solution that will give me good coverage. My budget is ~USD400.

I was browsing Newegg and spotted that they had an openbox ET8s on for $423 ($100 off) so I quickly placed an order on what appears to be the last one. But they also have the XT8 on for $399 ($50 off) so it's only a minor difference between the two...

Questions...
1) Is the ET8 a good buy at this price?

2) I saw on this comparison by Dong Knows Tech, he says that:

if you place the hardware of the ET8 too far away from each other or behind a wall, it’ll automatically use the 5GHz or even the 2.4GHz band for the backhaul, resulting in slow speeds.

This will be my situation (i.e. through a wall or two), so is this still an issue? Since the ET8 would be dropping to the 2x2 5GHz channel, would the XT8 be a better option for me since it would still use the 5GHz 4x4 channel for the backhaul?

3) General thoughts or suggestions?

4) Any alternate recommendations? I saw that the Asus' parental controls and other features are not subscription based, which I liked when
compared to some other brands.

Note, while reading some other threads on SNB I stumbled onto MoCA adapters. There seems to be coax available in each room in this house, however only the one in the attic seems to be hooked up to anything. I'd have to do quite a bit of tracing and rewiring to make it work, so I was hoping to find a simple wireless backhaul solution that would suit my needs before having to go down this route. But if there's a cheaper alternative that I could have similar performance with when using a MoCA, then that's an option for me as well.

Thanks!

 

[bill001g]

Moca is going to be worth spend a lot of time fixing the wiring. You can't even think to compare any wifi to moca. Moca can achieve full gigabit speeds you will get nowhere close to that on any wifi.

The easy way to run moca is take a splitter and connect all the coax cables together in the attic that way you don't care where they go. In some ways it would be better to not have extra unused drops but it likely will cause no issues. Besides you could put a moca box in every room

Without reading that whole article I think you missed the key critical difference. The ET8 supports the newest form of wifi. Wifi6e should solve many of the issues we currently have with wifi. In most cases you can't even use wifi6 because of the radar avoidance rules. Many end devices only support 80mhz radio channels.
This is why you see many people saying wifi6 doesn't run any better than wifi5 (802.11ac). You need to have end devices and routers that both can use 160mhz radios channels. Even without the weather radar issue it is extremely hard to get that much bandwidth since all your neighbors are using the same radio blocks and stomping on you.

We will hopefully soon see real end consumers results from use of wifi6e and see if it again is a bunch of fake numbers from the router manufactures. In theory at least with all this extra bandwidth you can have 9 or so 160mhz bands with no overlap and there is no weather radio on the 6ghz radio bands to worry about.

Wifi6e is so new not a lot of end devices have support.

In any case I would try to use moca as the back haul between the wifi units. The only thing better than moca is a real ethernet cable. Moca seems to be one of those things that actually does what the vendors promise. Not so sure about the 2.5g ones, but the 1gbit ones really do get 1gbit in most houses.

 

[amriths]

Thanks Bill. Just to confirm what you're saying is stick with the ET8 but use MoCA instead of the wireless backhaul, that way I'll have all three bands (2.5, 5 and 6 GHz) available for clients?

I don't think a MoCA in every room would make much $ sense, but I could probably do one pair just for the routers. Have a brand or model that you'd recommend?

Thanks again!

 

[bill001g]

Most people really like gocoax and that was pretty much the only brand if you wanted the fast units because actiontec did not sell the fast units to end consumers and were always lots more expensive. Lately there have been some other brands selling similar MoCA adapters. Actiontec even though where the leader for many years still does not sell the ones based on the 2.5g network speed to consumers.

 

[TonyF]

Most people really like gocoax and that was pretty much the only brand if you wanted the fast units because actiontec did not sell the fast units to end consumers and were always lots more expensive. Lately there have been some other brands selling similar MoCA adapters. Actiontec even though where the leader for many years still does not sell the ones based on the 2.5g network speed to consumers.

GoCoax 2.5G works really well, though you’ll need a router with a 2.5G port in your router to take full advantage of it. In fact, you’ll want at least one of your mesh routers to have 2, 2.5G ports, one for a DOCSIS 3.1 2.5G modem connection and the other for your MoCA 2.5G connection. Remember that MoCA 2.5 is shared bandwidth, which is perfect for a 2.5G capable backhaul.

If you can, I recommend decoupling your ISP drop that’s routed to your cable modem from the rest of the coax runs in your house. Most DOCSIS 3.1 modems are not using the MoCA frequency range. This probably won’t always be the case as some ISP’s will likely want to use MoCA bandwidth to provide higher data rates in the future. ISP’s will use the MoCA frequencies on cable drops, even if you don’t need the additional internet speed, and that will lower you MoCA bandwidth to below 2.5G throughput. Consequently, you’ll need 2 independent coax lines that are routed to your modem and router, one for your modem and one for you 2.5G router backhaul.

You’ll want to consider getting an Ethernet switch with a 2.5G uplink and 4 or more 1G LAN ports. in rooms with high 1G demand to minimize bandwidth bottlenecks.