[GianFabien]

Products sold as "routers" are technically a gateway router, firewall, ethernet switch and one or two access points in a single shiny plastic box. All run by the cheapest CPU with smallest RAM that yields sufficient profit at that price point.

When you don't run any ethernet cabling, mesh network device placement is critical because the back-haul needs to get an adequate signal to the originating device as well as provide good coverage for its area. The construction materials of the home have a big impact upon what works and what doesn't.

[rektide]

I was skeptical of the Google Mesh product too but this is a very big & weirdly spaced out row house with very intense double-thick & overbuilt internal walls/floors, and seeing how well the Google Mesh products did, how low the latency was & high the bandwidth was in even some of the weirdest setups: it incredibly impressed me. I'd been a believer in APs with fixed ethernet, a huge skeptic of mesh backhauls, but my roommates spending $229 to build a secondary network enormously proved my doubts wrong. Now I think this needs to be seen to believed & that most skepticism is incredibly misplaced.

The seeming truth of the matter is that most wifi devices just have terrible radio gear. The mesh units said they only had so-so signal in my house, but they just had so very much better radios. I don't think we had a single client device anywhere would ever dip below 300mbps if it's radio could get that high. The backhauls for most mesh gear are incredibly good. I would put away your fear, in most cases. These products work incredibly good. Sometimes you may indeed need to add one more node to make all your problems go away - to make the hops physically shorter, to give the backhauls shorter/lower-interference links - but that's much much easier than dropping ethernet, is such an easy chore to deal with. Any potential problem can be solved by adding more nodes, creating a denser / less long distance mesh.

If you really demand on gigabit (really, post-gigabit; mesh can definitely do gigabit) everywhere, yes, you may need to raise your spend a lot, and use 2.5Gbit ethernet APs that can bandsteer among themsleves. Frankly I think this is kind of a suckers game for 99.99% of people. The mesh products are amazing. Their latency & responsiveness is incredibly good, the bandwidth far more than adequate. Many have very reasonable costs, where-as most multi-AP solutions cost unreasonably more for no reason other than market-segmentation-exploitation.

Ideally the WAN access is not "at one end" of the mesh, but even if it is, I think it'll probably be solid for most folks in most circumstances.