Question Dual or Tri-band Mesh Wifi?

[zmihlrad]

Hey All,

I have a tri-band router however the third band is 6ghz to which I do not have a single 6ghz capable device.

Is there any reason to pay more than double for a tri band mesh system in this case or should I just get a dual band?

There is no way to make the third band 5ghz as far as I know.


I am looking at the TPLink Deco X25, which is $180 for a 3 piece system. (dual band wifi 6)

Or the TPLink Deco AXE5300 which is $399 for a 3 piece system. (tri-band wifi 6E)

 

[bill001g]

In some ways it would be nice if it had 2 6ghz radio and no 5ghz.

You really shouldn't use mesh unless you have no other options. Consider moca and powerline connection to the remote rooms before mesh.

So I will kinda ignore the mesh question, that makes it more complex.

So a device with dual 5g wifi6 is a waste of money. The thing that makes wifi6 faster is the ability to run 160mhz radio bands. Technically there are zero of these on the 5g band. It can be accomplished by overlapping restricted channels used by things like weather radar. Problem is if these channels are in use it must drop back to 80mhz which is the same as wifi5 (802.11ac). You for sure will not get 2 160mhz radio connections. And this ignores the fact that you are already overlapping every neighbor using wifi on 5g.

Wifi6e has the 6ghz band and it has a massive amount of bandwidth so you and your nieghbors can have 160mhz radio bands with no overlap.....for a while.

I guess it depends on when you feel you will get wifi6e end devices. Otherwise try to save some money and buy 802.11ac units until you decide to upgrade to wifi6e.

Still I would spend any new money on some kind of wired solution etheret,moca,powerline, to the remote rooms rather than spend money on mesh.

 

[zmihlrad]

So i have a dual band TPlink power line kit sitting next to me.

and it didn’t work. It would not sync with the router even after I turned off self organizing network.

 

[zmihlrad]

What’s actually happening with the power line adapter is it’s copying the wifi channels fine, and then blocking the signal to all devices.

so the wifi network will show up, and everything on it gets no internet. Unplugging the power line revolves is.

 

[bill001g]

Not sure I normally don't use powerline units with wifi radios in the far end.

I am not sure how you configure the powerline units but I would start with just using them with ethernet only with the wifi radios disabled in the powerline. Then maybe try to turn the radios on and at least temporarily set the ssid different on the powerline units so you know exactly which wifi radio you are connecting to. When you have the same ssid for everything the end device will pick and sometimes it is not very smart.

When I have done this I have used a router as a AP in the remote room, partially because the old router was available and why pay for more for a powerline unit with it in when it is not need. The key feature that most router/ap have is the ability to reduce the radio power. When you have multiple wifi sources in the house you need to reduce the power on the remote units so you have as little overlap as possible. This is to help the end devices properly switch between wifi sources. Note mesh only pretends it can do the roaming, it is actually controlled by the end devices and many mesh unit you can not adjust the radio power either.