Smokey613
Very Senior Member
I finally ditched my AC86U/eero pro 3 unit setup and went with a AC86U/2-XT8 setup. The eero setup worked well enough, especially in bridge mode off of my RT-AC86U. I am just too dependent on Merlin‘s firmware to give it up and the AC86U has been rock solid. My main gripe on the eero units is no ability to manage them if for some reason they loose internet connectivity. Even with them in bridge mode behind the AC86U, if the net goes down, I have no access to them. The only drawback to the XT8 system is no Merlin support. After further research, I determined they work pretty good in AP/AiMesh mode. So the trusty AC86U is still doing all the heavy lifting and the new XT8 units simply provide network wifi connectivity and an ethernet link to my laptop and windows media server in my outside office. So far, I am very happy with this setup. The only changes I made to the XT8 side was updating to the 42095 firmware and setting my wifi ssid and password. I left all other settings to default including SmartConnect. I assigned static IPs for the two XT8 in the DHCP server of the AC86U. I may eventually replace the AC86U with a AX86U but for now the old workhorse is handling my 100/10 connection and my amtm scripts just fine.
