AX86U or XT8 (2 pack)?

[uriel250]

I currently use the AX86U as main router and it's running great. However the placement in my house is pretty horrible and the router is basically on the "Edge" of my house.

I want to add one more piece to my WiFi to create AiMesh network.
I thought about selling my AX86U (Losing some money obv) and going two XT8?

Or better stay with the AX86U and go with a single XT8? I know I can also buy the AX68U which is cheaper but for wireless backhaul I think there's going to be bottleneck with my 500Mbps up down internet speed.

What do you think?

Have you tried the XT8? It seems like there are mixed reviews for it some negative and some positive. My area has almost no wifi networks so theres not gonna be interferences.

 

[HTBruceM]

I assume you're not going to run CAT6 to the other location and will rely on Wi-Fi for the mesh backhaul. Placement of the 2nd node will be critical to get a good Wi-Fi link on the backhaul back to the main router.

The Wi-Fi is a bit of a mixed bag in terms of performance:

	2.4Ghz	5Ghz-1	5Ghz-2
AX86u	3x3	4x4	n/a
XT8	2x2	2x2	4x4

XT8 is tri-band. Your backhaul connection can be either: Dedicated 5Ghz-2, Shared on 5Ghz-2, or shared on 2.4Ghz. If you can run CAT-6 and go with ethernet backhaul, you can repurpose the 5Ghz-2 band as another fronthaul connection.

The AX86u is dual band. For a Wi-Fi mesh backhaul connection it must share the same radio/band with your fronthaul to your clients, on either 2.4ghz or 5ghz. That shared usage can potentially drop your bandwidth on the band by up to 50%, depending on the traffic. That is the worst case though; YMMV considerably depending on what is connected to your mesh node and how much bandwidth it is using.

Since you will have little to no Wi-Fi from your neighbors, you can probably take full advantage of both non-DFS 80mhz channels to fully utilize both 5Ghz radios on the XT8. Sorry but I don't have any personal experience with the XT8. However I do own 2x RT-AX86u in AiMesh, with 2.5Gbe backhaul. The RT-AX86u is a favorite model here in these forums, especially when connected with an ethernet backhaul to other AX86u nodes.

One thing to consider... the AX86u has Merlin support, whereas the XT8 does not.

If you are concerned about losing bandwidth due to the backhaul being shared with the fronthaul, I would opt for another AX86u or some other AiMesh compatible unit that includes 4x4 on the 5Ghz band. I suppose you could even buy a single XT8 and experiment with which one you designate as Router vs. AiMesh node.

 

[uriel250]

I assume you're not going to run CAT6 to the other location and will rely on Wi-Fi for the mesh backhaul. Placement of the 2nd node will be critical to get a good Wi-Fi link on the backhaul back to the main router.

The Wi-Fi is a bit of a mixed bag in terms of performance:

	2.4Ghz	5Ghz-1	5Ghz-2
AX86u	3x3	4x4	n/a
XT8	2x2	2x2	4x4

XT8 is tri-band. Your backhaul connection can be either: Dedicated 5Ghz-2, Shared on 5Ghz-2, or shared on 2.4Ghz. If you can run CAT-6 and go with ethernet backhaul, you can repurpose the 5Ghz-2 band as another fronthaul connection.

The AX86u is dual band. For a Wi-Fi mesh backhaul connection it must share the same radio/band with your fronthaul to your clients, on either 2.4ghz or 5ghz. That shared usage can potentially drop your bandwidth on the band by up to 50%, depending on the traffic. That is the worst case though; YMMV considerably depending on what is connected to your mesh node and how much bandwidth it is using.

Since you will have little to no Wi-Fi from your neighbors, you can probably take full advantage of both non-DFS 80mhz channels to fully utilize both 5Ghz radios on the XT8. Sorry but I don't have any personal experience with the XT8. However I do own 2x RT-AX86u in AiMesh, with 2.5Gbe backhaul. The RT-AX86u is a favorite model here in these forums, especially when connected with an ethernet backhaul to other AX86u nodes.

One thing to consider... the AX86u has Merlin support, whereas the XT8 does not.

If you are concerned about losing bandwidth due to the backhaul being shared with the fronthaul, I would opt for another AX86u or some other AiMesh compatible unit that includes 4x4 on the 5Ghz band. I suppose you could even buy a single XT8 and experiment with which one you designate as Router vs. AiMesh node.

Thank you so much for the detailed answer.

I am now even more confused
What do you recommend me to do? Going with a single XT8 or AX86U? And what does "Dedicated" and "Shared" means for the bands?

 

[HTBruceM]

I think it's a toss up spec-wise. Personally I would do the AX86u, just because it has a large following, mature software & HW design, and the Merlin FW option. It might be hard to find in stock though. Since it has 4x4 on the 5Ghz band, it has very high bandwidth and in practice, even though the backhaul would be on a shared Wi-Fi channel, it is quite "beefy" and you probably won't even notice.

Dedicated means that the Wi-Fi channel is used SOLELY for one purpose - i.e. the backhaul connection between the AiMesh units. No sharing of that available bandwidth with the clients. That's what you would get with a pair of XT8s.

Shared means that the Wi-Fi channel bandwidth must be split between client devices and the backhaul AiMesh connection. Say you have a client connected to the AiMesh node Wi-Fi. And that client wants to communicate with the internet. To get to/from the internet, that client's data has to first travel between the client and the AiMesh node, and then AGAIN between the AiMesh node and the Router. If both of those connections are using the same SHARED Wi-Fi channel, that channel's capacity was just used TWICE to move the SAME DATA. If you maxed out that channel, you have basically cut it's available data-carrying capacity in half.

Obviously, this also means that to avoid the same issue with a pair of tri-band XT8 units, the 3rd 5Ghz backhaul radio must be on a different Wi-Fi channel than the other 5Ghz radio that is used for client connections. Since you say other Wi-Fi neighbors won't be a problem, this is totally possible.

 

[uriel250]

I think it's a toss up spec-wise. Personally I would do the AX86u, just because it has a large following, mature software & HW design, and the Merlin FW option. It might be hard to find in stock though. Since it has 4x4 on the 5Ghz band, it has very high bandwidth and in practice, even though the backhaul would be on a shared Wi-Fi channel, it is quite "beefy" and you probably won't even notice.

Dedicated means that the Wi-Fi channel is used SOLELY for one purpose - i.e. the backhaul connection between the AiMesh units. No sharing of that available bandwidth with the clients. That's what you would get with a pair of XT8s.

Shared means that the Wi-Fi channel bandwidth must be split between client devices and the backhaul AiMesh connection. Say you have a client connected to the AiMesh node Wi-Fi. And that client wants to communicate with the internet. To get to/from the internet, that client's data has to first travel between the client and the AiMesh node, and then AGAIN between the AiMesh node and the Router. If both of those connections are using the same SHARED Wi-Fi channel, that channel's capacity was just used TWICE to move the SAME DATA. If you maxed out that channel, you have basically cut it's available data-carrying capacity in half.

Obviously, this also means that to avoid the same issue with a pair of tri-band XT8 units, the 3rd 5Ghz backhaul radio must be on a different Wi-Fi channel than the other 5Ghz radio that is used for client connections. Since you say other Wi-Fi neighbors won't be a problem, this is totally possible.

So AX86U it is ... Considering I don't have neighbors networks around, which channel is going to be the best for the shared wireless backhaul?

 

[RogerSC]

I'd like to point out that the issue is that if you use 2 RT-AX86U's in a mesh configuration you're using the same 5GHz. radio for backhaul and for clients, so assuming that you go with two RT-AX86U's, you'll see about 1/2 speed at the remote node. As opposed with going with two routers that have 3 radios each, like the XT8's in the ZenWifi AX, so that the backhaul is using a dedicated radio that doesn't have clients on it. There's much less interaction between client use and backhaul use with 3 radios per node than there is with two radios (one 5GHz. radio) per node. The way that two radio routers work best in a mesh is to use wired backhaul. If you want to have wireless backhaul that works at full speed then go for nodes with 3 radios.

Even though the ZenWiFi AX that I have doesn't have RMerlin firmware (which I would personally prefer), it is stable and fast. I did try an AiMesh configuration with 2 RT-AC86u's a while ago, and it was disappointing with wireless backhaul. The ZenWiFi AX works much better than that.

However, if you can pull off wired backhaul using either ethernet or MoCA, then I'd go with adding another RT-AX86U.

 

[uriel250]

I'd like to point out that the issue is that if you use 2 RT-AX86U's in a mesh configuration you're using the same 5GHz. radio for backhaul and for clients, so assuming that you go with two RT-AX86U's, you'll see about 1/2 speed at the remote node. As opposed with going with two routers that have 3 radios each, so that the backhaul is using a dedicated radio that doesn't have clients on it. There's much less interaction between client use and backhaul use with 3 radios per node than there is with two radios (one 5GHz. radio) per node. The way that two radio routers work best in a mesh is to use wired backhaul. If you want to have wireless backhaul that works at full speed then go for nodes with 3 radios.

Even though the ZenWiFi AX that I have doesn't have RMerlin firmware (which I would personally prefer), it is stable and fast. I did try an AiMesh configuration with 2 RT-AC86u's a while ago, and it was disappointing with wireless backhaul. The ZenWiFi AX works much better than that.

Uh well. I'll hold off for a while ... The XT8 has only 3 ports, which switch is recommended to be used with it?

Maybe I'll jump to AX11000 even though that's a lot of money :O

And on which channels did you set your XT8?

 

[RogerSC]

I used an app on my Android tablet to figure out which channels to use, "Wi-Fi Analyzer". I looked to be on either channels 1, 6, or 11 on 2.4GHz., and ended up on channel 6 as the least used channel in my area. For 5GHz., I ended up channel 44 on the low 5GHz. band, and channel 157 on the high 5GHz. band. For 5GHz., most people use 80MHz. channels around here, so I just try to be on the same one as my neighbors, overlap is generally worse than being on the same channel.

Since I moved from the eero to the ZenWiFi AX, I already had three dumb, unmanaged network switches, two TP-Link 8 port switches and a Netgear 5 port switch. One of the 8-port switches is co-located with my AiMesh router node. They're very inexpensive and have been totally reliable for years. I'm not a big managed switch ethusiast, I'll let my routers do that for me *smile*.

 

[uriel250]

I used an app on my Android tablet to figure out which channels to use, "Wi-Fi Analyzer". I looked to be on either channels 1, 6, or 11 on 2.4GHz., and ended up on channel 6 as the least used channel in my area. For 5GHz., I ended up channel 44 on the low 5GHz. band, and channel 157 on the high 5GHz. band. For 5GHz., most people use 80MHz. channels around here, so I just try to be on the same one as my neighbors, overlap is generally worse than being on the same channel.

Since I moved from the eero to the ZenWiFi AX, I already had three dumb, unmanaged network switches, two TP-Link 8 port switches and a Netgear 5 port switch. One of the 8-port switches is co-located with my AiMesh router node. They're very inexpensive and have been totally reliable for years. I'm not a big managed switch ethusiast, I'll let my routers do that for me *smile*.

I went through reviews on Amazon and it seems like the TP-Link AX6600 mesh has better reviews rating than the Asus AX6600 ZenWiFi ... What do you think?

Also, for how long you had the XT8?

 

[Daylight_Invader]

Personally I am now loving the XT8, but it has taken a year of pain to get to this point where Asus pretty much treated us all as guinea pigs.

Latest firmware works a treat.

 

[uriel250]

Personally I am now loving the XT8, but it has taken a year of pain to get to this point where Asus pretty much treated us all as guinea pigs.

Latest firmware works a treat.

Sounds good, so I can ignore the old reviews on Amazon ... I think I am giving it a try, and if that doesn't work well - then I will return it.
The only thing I am going to lose is Merlin FW hope the stock firmware is good enough.

Thank you so much for the help.

 

[Daylight_Invader]

I take all reviews on Amazon with a pinch of salt, as well over half of the reviews on any tech product will be for another version of the product range, so often makes zero sense. In fact Amazon reviews on any technology are hardly worth reading because of the way they package them together. Take for example a product launch of something like the 3080Ti, they will have reviews right now which actually come from another product range yet as we know, the 3080Ti is hardly even in the hands of customers.

Up until last week, I would have told you to not purchase the XT8 and go for something a little more traditional. Now that we finally have a more mature firmware release, it does appear to be a more solid product that I can finally recommend. Just make sure you follow advice and do a full factory hard reset. Also ensure that you split up your bands and make 2.4 for IoT, etc. Also disable all the extras on the 2.4 band as most IoT devices can't deal with more than vanilla or they will drop off your network (the downside of IoT devices). Also match your 5-1 and 5-2 bands to appropriate devices and select the goodies which will actually work on those bands. If you follow that recipe, you should be good to go.

 

[HTBruceM]

I'd like to point out that the issue is that if you use 2 RT-AX86U's in a mesh configuration you're using the same 5GHz. radio for backhaul and for clients, so assuming that you go with two RT-AX86U's, you'll see about 1/2 speed at the remote node. As opposed with going with two routers that have 3 radios each, like the XT8's in the ZenWifi AX, so that the backhaul is using a dedicated radio that doesn't have clients on it. There's much less interaction between client use and backhaul use with 3 radios per node than there is with two radios (one 5GHz. radio) per node. The way that two radio routers work best in a mesh is to use wired backhaul. If you want to have wireless backhaul that works at full speed then go for nodes with 3 radios.

Even though the ZenWiFi AX that I have doesn't have RMerlin firmware (which I would personally prefer), it is stable and fast. I did try an AiMesh configuration with 2 RT-AC86u's a while ago, and it was disappointing with wireless backhaul. The ZenWiFi AX works much better than that.

However, if you can pull off wired backhaul using either ethernet or MoCA, then I'd go with adding another RT-AX86U.

No disagreement in principle. However....

The XT8 fronthaul radio is 2x2 which means it tops out at 866Mbps using 80mhz channel width.
The AX86u has a 4x4 radio which means it can top out at 1.73Gbps using 80mhz channel width.
So given the same 80Mhz channel width, the 4x4 radio on the AX86u provides 2x the bandwidth of the XT8 fronthaul with MU-MIMO.
A pair of AX86u sharing 1.73Gbps between fronthaul & backhaul nets you effectively 866Mbps for each haul in worst case scenario - the same performance as the XT8 fronthaul. Assuming conditions are good enough between the units to achieve that link rate.

EDIT: Actually you can also SHARE the 2nd 5Ghz radio on the XT8 between fronthaul/backhaul, so there is some advantage there.

IMO from an Wi-Fi perspective, the benefit of the XT8 comes into play when you have 3 or more of them, when the backhaul can be more fully utilized. Since you're not going to get any better performance with 2 units, the decision maker might be cost.

BTW the AX86u also has a better 3x3 radio on the 2.4Ghz band. In theory the extra spatial stream capacity there could improve either performance or Wi-Fi range/coverage. I also prefer the antennas on the AX86u, you can tweak the positioning a bit.

 

[uriel250]

No disagreement in principle. However....

The XT8 fronthaul radio is 2x2 which means it tops out at 866Mbps using 80mhz channel width.
The AX86u has a 4x4 radio which means it can top out at 1.73Gbps using 80mhz channel width.
So given the same 80Mhz channel width, the 4x4 radio on the AX86u provides 2x the bandwidth of the XT8 fronthaul with MU-MIMO.
A pair of AX86u sharing 1.73Gbps between fronthaul & backhaul nets you effectively 866Mbps for each haul in worst case scenario - the same performance as the XT8 fronthaul. Assuming conditions are good enough between the units to achieve that link rate.

EDIT: Actually you can also SHARE the 2nd 5Ghz radio on the XT8 between fronthaul/backhaul, so there is some advantage there.

IMO from an Wi-Fi perspective, the benefit of the XT8 comes into play when you have 3 or more of them, when the backhaul can be more fully utilized. Since you're not going to get any better performance with 2 units, the decision maker might be cost.

BTW the AX86u also has a better 3x3 radio on the 2.4Ghz band. In theory the extra spatial stream capacity there could improve either performance or Wi-Fi range/coverage. I also prefer the antennas on the AX86u, you can tweak the positioning a bit.

OK, fair enough. Great explanation.

However I read online that using wireless backhaul without dedicated band can cause some latency issues. Is it true?

Hard choice, don't know what to do ...

 

[Daylight_Invader]

I take all reviews on Amazon with a pinch of salt, as well over half of the reviews on any tech product will be for another version of the product range, so often makes zero sense. In fact Amazon reviews on any technology are hardly worth reading because of the way they package them together. Take for example a product launch of something like the 3080Ti, they will have reviews right now which actually come from another product range yet as we know, the 3080Ti is hardly even in the hands of customers.

Up until last week, I would have told you to not purchase the XT8 and go for something a little more traditional. Now that we finally have a more mature firmware release, it does appear to be a more solid product that I can finally recommend. Just make sure you follow advice and do a full factory hard reset. Also ensure that you split up your bands and make 2.4 for IoT, etc. Also disable all the extras on the 2.4 band as most IoT devices can't deal with more than vanilla or they will drop off your network (the downside of IoT devices). Also match your 5-1 and 5-2 bands to appropriate devices and select the goodies which will actually work on those bands. If you follow that recipe, you should be good to go.

I should add that I’m using wired backhaul, freeing up the 5-2 for high speed transfers for my few ax products.

 

[HTBruceM]

However I read online that using wireless backhaul without dedicated band can cause some latency issues. Is it true?

I don't really know about this, but just spit-balling a little bit... I suppose that is theoretically possible because a packet may have to wait in order to be transmitted on a shared band. But I would expect that MU-MIMO technology would largely overcome that limitation; it enables multiple spatial streams to operate simultaneously within the band. The latency thing strikes me as splitting hairs - something you would be hard pressed to experience in actual practice. But like I said, spit-balling.

BTW I think you would be satisfied with the performance of either setup. (Cost factors aside).

 

[RogerSC]

OK, fair enough. Great explanation.

However I read online that using wireless backhaul without dedicated band can cause some latency issues. Is it true?

Hard choice, don't know what to do ...

Latency issue relative to what? Yes, ethernet backhaul is faster, since wired is faster. But I see very little extra latency here with the ZenWiFi AX with wireless backhaul. At any rate, I find the ZenWiFi here is the fastest wireless that I've had...~500Mbps or more on speed tests at the remote node with wireless backhaul. Might be a couple more ms. of latency when using wireless backhaul, so the latency here might be 9ms. on the wireless, while it's 7ms. on a hardwired connection to the router node. I'm not a gamer so I'm not going to lose much sleep over a couple of ms. of latency.

 

[RogerSC]

I take all reviews on Amazon with a pinch of salt, as well over half of the reviews on any tech product will be for another version of the product range, so often makes zero sense. In fact Amazon reviews on any technology are hardly worth reading because of the way they package them together. Take for example a product launch of something like the 3080Ti, they will have reviews right now which actually come from another product range yet as we know, the 3080Ti is hardly even in the hands of customers.

Up until last week, I would have told you to not purchase the XT8 and go for something a little more traditional. Now that we finally have a more mature firmware release, it does appear to be a more solid product that I can finally recommend. Just make sure you follow advice and do a full factory hard reset. Also ensure that you split up your bands and make 2.4 for IoT, etc. Also disable all the extras on the 2.4 band as most IoT devices can't deal with more than vanilla or they will drop off your network (the downside of IoT devices). Also match your 5-1 and 5-2 bands to appropriate devices and select the goodies which will actually work on those bands. If you follow that recipe, you should be good to go.

I should add that I’m using wired backhaul, freeing up the 5-2 for high speed transfers for my few ax products.

On the Amazon reviews, there is a way that you can see only the reviews of the exact product that you're looking for...if you go to the set of choices at the head of the review, where you can pick "top reviews" or "latest", there's a box that shows "All Formats" by default, click on it, and pick the product that you're looking at. That gives you the reviews for just that product.

Unfortunately, you can't do the same thing with the review histogram that breaks down the number of reviews for each number of stars, but at least you can read only the reviews for the product you're considering buying.

 

[RogerSC]

I went through reviews on Amazon and it seems like the TP-Link AX6600 mesh has better reviews rating than the Asus AX6600 ZenWiFi ... What do you think?

Also, for how long you had the XT8?

I generally don't consider TP-LInk because their firmware support isn't anywhere as long or frequent as Asus. I want to get fixes for the latest security exploits, and Asus does that for several years. Not forever, but for several years.

I've had the ZenWiFi since January of this year, and have been through several firmware versions. There have been a couple that haven't been stable for me, so I stay with the latest version that's stable. The latest version right at the moment is doing really well both for performance and stability for me, I'm very happy with it.

 

[uriel250]

I generally don't consider TP-LInk because their firmware support isn't anywhere as long or frequent as Asus. I want to get fixes for the latest security exploits, and Asus does that for several years. Not forever, but for several years.

I've had the ZenWiFi since January of this year, and have been through several firmware versions. There have been a couple that haven't been stable for me, so I stay with the latest version that's stable. The latest version right at the moment is doing really well both for performance and stability for me, I'm very happy with it.

Do you use wireless or wired backhaul?

And regarding your previous comment, I meant higher latency when comparing 2x AX86U in mesh wireless backhaul (because its dual band) to XT8 (Which is tri-band with dedicated band for mesh).