| The best cure to bad WiFi is Ethernet. There are only 3 usable channels in the 2.4 GHz band and that is nowhere near enough. Much of the 5 GHz band is unavailable with cheap access points because it competes with weather radar. Any traffic you get onto Ethernet is not going over WiFi and it is freeing up capacity for devices that do use WiFi. Mesh WiFi is a scam and it is just common sense that it is. If you have multiple network hops you use more frequencies, not less, you get more latency, not less, you get more packet loss, not less. How could it be any other way? It doesn’t help that the meshing happens over 5 GHz which goes through walls much less than 2.4 GHz.. People want to believe in mesh WiFi but check any forum and you will find people who are struggling with mesh WiFi but stubbornly insist on using it. Don’t be that guy. In my old farmhouse where the walls are full of little nails I use this stuff https://ui.com/wi-fi I have four access points connected with Ethernet. At times I’ve had one in the wood shed with a power line Ethernet adapter connected to it which is fine for a point-to-point link but not if you have more than two devices plugged in. I watched them redo the wall between the a kitchen and that shed and it is a radio dead zone because there is a metal foil vapor barrier in it. If you were designing a building for optimal WiFi and didn’t mind the cost you would have radio opaque walls to cut interference and maximize privacy and an access point in each room. |
For one, the mesh back haul could use a different frequency band than the WiFi network. The cheapest WiFi extenders and mesh systems don't do this, but some do. But it still would be better to have wired back haul.