Disadvantages of Access Points vs, AiMesh

[kaanaslan]

Just add the new router as AiMesh node and it will automatically use one of your main router's bands for backhaul. Which one on a 4-band router - you are about to find out. The SSID will remain the same. Your new router in wireless AiMesh is going to work as a Repeater. The throughput to connected to it clients will be reduced in half.



I will give you single SSID for all available for clients bands. Not very Smart as technology, but will give you some Connect.

Oh and I’ll connect the aimesh router with ethernet backhaul.

 

[Tech9]

Your client will see single SSID. Make sure you really need this AiMesh node. Home routers work best as single device and adding more "nodes" when not needed will make your Wi-Fi only worse, not better. To me this GT-AX6000 as node doesn't make sense. The band with less coverage on your main router is 6GHz. This new node doesn't have 6GHz radio. In this case why pay more for GT-AX6000 when an RT-AX58U at half price will do the same thing basically? Wired it will be an extra Access Point only.

 

[kaanaslan]

Your client will see single SSID. Make sure you really need this AiMesh node. Home routers work best as single device and adding more "nodes" when not needed will make your Wi-Fi only worse, not better. To me this GT-AX6000 as node doesn't make sense. The band with less coverage on your main router is 6GHz. This new node doesn't have 6GHz radio. In this case why pay more for GT-AX6000 when an RT-AX58U at half price will do the same thing basically? Wired it will be an extra Access Point only.

I like its design. But it’s not really that necessary. My BE98 is working good in general. But in the bedroom at the back of the house the speedtest get about 15-20mbits speed. In the living room it’s about 860mbits. I don’t know if there is any setting yet I can work in the router’s admin page. It’s a new router and I’m still learning its features.

 

[Tech9]

Relocate the router to more central position. This will work better than AiMesh. You don't need full bars coverage everywhere and none of your tablets/phones need full speed. Don't overdo it - it won't get any better. You are overpaying already with perhaps "futureproofing" ideas. There is no such thing with home AIO routers.

 

[vlord]

I like its design. But it’s not really that necessary. My BE98 is working good in general. But in the bedroom at the back of the house the speedtest get about 15-20mbits speed. In the living room it’s about 860mbits. I don’t know if there is any setting yet I can work in the router’s admin page. It’s a new router and I’m still learning its features.

I’ve spent some pretty extensive time the past couple weekends trying to sort a similar challenge. In my setup, I had one bedroom far away that got around 200mbit down and 75mbit up and I had various corners of the house that worked okay but not great. I started off by getting a 50’ ethernet cable and 50’ extension cord and dragging my router around to see if I could find a more centralized location that would work reasonably well throughout. I could not, regardless of channel or any other settings, so I decided to go the distributed AP route. Here are a few things I can suggest based on my testing.

1. Turn your router down from performance to balanced. The router will blast the wifi signal but most clients don’t have similar power to return. Setting it to balanced will even things out greatly. I found that when set to balanced being closer to the router improved performance significantly and it didn’t affect the distance performance nearly as much as I feared. It also helped with clients jumping over more easily to edge APs. Frankly, I think this should be the default setting.

2. Skip the AI mesh unless you really need the distributed guest network and set your edge nodes as AP. Mesh forces all nodes to use the same channel which may conflict with each other or with a neighbor. While you are at it, make sure you are choosing channels that aren’t overlapping. If you have Roku devices, keep in mind that they won’t work on DFS channels.

3. I setup a common SSID with the same password for each the 2.4 and 5GHz bands. I also setup a unique “guest” SSID on each AP and router for the 5Ghz bands. This will allow you to pin static 5Ghz devices to a particular AP or the main router.

4. Roaming assistant is pretty much useless but I have found that setting it to either extreme makes things worse. I have mine set to -65db and it seems the least harmful setting I could find.

Note that this is what works for my particular setup. I have one GT-AX6000 and two RT-AX86Us as APs. My house was built in the 90s and doesn’t have any materials that overly inhibit radio transmissions aside from the concrete basement. YMMV.

 

[Zim]

Having difficulty deciding between Mesh vs AP for my use case scenario.

I've used Mesh with wired backhaul with AX11000 + XT9s for the past couple of years and as my device count has ballooned to 160+ devices I've noticed quite a bit of lag/delay in my IoT devices and security cameras, including intermittent disconnects. I have not been able to identify the source of the problem - whether it's network congestion, signal interference with so many clients and transmitters, insufficient hardware, the combination of Skynet + Unbound + AdGuard scripts or all of the above.

Over the years I've just learned to live with it, but recently I got several AXE16000 routers and I want to replace the router and the mesh nodes. With just one AXE16000 router, running stock firmware and default settings, the IoT devices (that have connected) seem to be running well (more than half of the devices are not getting a signal - need to add a mesh node or AP). Flashing the Merlin firmware with default settings and no scripts, I'm noticing minor lag (AdGuard is crucial so, Merlin firmware is mandatory I suppose).

Would it be better for me to run AXE16000s as Mesh with wired backhaul or as APs? My research is showing that APs is the way to go for performance, but I'll need to manage the APs manually. Which may be good, then I can change channel frequency and signal strength independently to avoid interference.

Also, with APs, should all the APs run the Merlin firmware or can they run the stock firmware? Will the roaming work as with the mesh setup (with some tinkering)?

 

[vlord]

Having difficulty deciding between Mesh vs AP for my use case scenario.

I've used Mesh with wired backhaul with AX11000 + XT9s for the past couple of years and as my device count has ballooned to 160+ devices I've noticed quite a bit of lag/delay in my IoT devices and security cameras, including intermittent disconnects. I have not been able to identify the source of the problem - whether it's network congestion, signal interference with so many clients and transmitters, insufficient hardware, the combination of Skynet + Unbound + AdGuard scripts or all of the above.

Over the years I've just learned to live with it, but recently I got several AXE16000 routers and I want to replace the router and the mesh nodes. With just one AXE16000 router, running stock firmware and default settings, the IoT devices (that have connected) seem to be running well (more than half of the devices are not getting a signal - need to add a mesh node or AP). Flashing the Merlin firmware with default settings and no scripts, I'm noticing minor lag (AdGuard is crucial so, Merlin firmware is mandatory I suppose).

Would it be better for me to run AXE16000s as Mesh with wired backhaul or as APs? My research is showing that APs is the way to go for performance, but I'll need to manage the APs manually. Which may be good, then I can change channel frequency and signal strength independently to avoid interference.

Also, with APs, should all the APs run the Merlin firmware or can they run the stock firmware? Will the roaming work as with the mesh setup (with some tinkering)?

I run my APs with Merlin, mostly because I also run other tools on them like a speedtest server. The nice thing about APs is that you have flexibility not only to distribute the wireless nodes but also any tools like AGH as well. With as many devices that you have, I would create a common wireless SSID to be share across all your nodes but also create unique SSIDs via the guest option and then pin stationary devices to those SSIDs. Only things like phones, tablets, laptops that are mobile really need to be on the common SSID and even then if they aren’t moving very much you can pin them to a specific SSID. Make sure you also separate your 2.4 SSID out separate from your 5 GHz band and use 2.4 for all your IOT / low bandwidth items

 

[Dedel66]

It is not possible to have a "real" guest network on an access point. Devices connected to this guest network can access your intranet. If you want a real, separate guest network on an access point, you MUST use a mesh system.

 

[coxhaus]

It is not possible to have a "real" guest network on an access point. Devices connected to this guest network can access your intranet. If you want a real, separate guest network on an access point, you MUST use a mesh system.

That is crap. Please explain yourself. In a real network you can have better than a guest network. So many different ways.

 

[vlord]

That is crap. Please explain yourself. In a real network you can have better than a guest network. So many different ways.

He’s saying that the option to disable “access intranet” in the guest network options is not available when a Asus Router is operating in AP only mode, which is true. I use the “guest” network just to define a specific SSID for that AP to pin devices rather than them potentially trying to roam across other APs. I’ve read there are some hacky ways to get network isolation on the guest network in AP mode but they certainly aren’t straight forward.