Will offloading routing from my main Asus router to pfSense improve wifi speeds?

[AlpineMan]

Recently upgraded from a pair of AX92U's to a pair of ZenWifi ET12's. At first I had them setup in AiMesh, but I didn't like the fact that the 2.4ghz radios on both ET12's were on the same channel...same with 5 and 6ghz radios. So I abandoned AiMesh and just set up the former node as an AP and manually chose different channels. Wifi speeds were ok, but I saw a youtube video where a reviewer was able to achieve almost line speed wifi speed tests (up & down) on 6e.. he's got 1gig fiber. He mentioned he's only got about 30 or so wifi devices connected during his tests. For me however, I've got somewhere between 100 to 120 devices, also with 1gig fiber. Best I was able to achieve was about 750mbps down / 500mbps up with me literally less than 5ft away from the main ET12. If I run the speedtest on the main ET's admin UI...speed test results show around 950+ up/down. Dumb question...would offloading the routing on my main ET router to say...pfSense improve my wifi performance...basically just use both my ET's as AP's? BTW, I use Pihole for my DNS/DHCP services running in a VM. These services have been disabled on my main ET12.

 

[bbunge]

Likely not. Remember that a mesh network is to improve coverage not bandwidth. Using Ethernet backhaul can improve bandwidth. And having router and node radios on the same channels is not a bad thing.

 

[AlpineMan]

Likely not. Remember that a mesh network is to improve coverage not bandwidth. Using Ethernet backhaul can improve bandwidth. And having router and node radios on the same channels is not a bad thing.

Thank you for the reply. I failed to add that my ET12's are using MoCA bridge backhaul. My laptop connected to the AP via ethernet gets around 880mbps up/down using this bridge.

 

[degrub]

That is within normal range for all devices using 1 Gbit/s ethernet interfaces on the wired connections for a point to point moca setup. The wifi environment being a wild card for bandwidth. Except for local device to device transfers, higher link rates between the wifi devices and between the LAN devices will not appreciably increase your bandwidth across the internet. Maybe local backups, etc will be quicker, but that is about it. You also may expose any CPU limitations due to configuration requirements.