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Mesh WiFi is digital cancer. It is the ultimate in selfish asshole technology. Let me explain. Elsewhere in the thread others have touched on WiFi channels being a shared medium so I'll skip over that.

My neighbor has mesh WiFi. Correction - my neighbor THREE HOUSES OVER has mesh WiFi. How do I know this? Because his multiple access points show up in a scan with ridiculous output power, at nearly the same power as the AP in my own house. WiFi packet captures show these things are enormously chatty, constantly occupying the channels with management traffic to perform their mesh thing.

You want to live out in the country with no one around you for half a mile? Have at it. You live in a dense neighborhood with many APs where channel selection is limited? Fuck anyone and everyone that uses mesh WiFi in this situation. Literally everyone around you suffers so you can have your "very very low latency and super reliability". It's like lighting up a cigar in a crowded train car with no regard for anyone around you.

I'm not sure what you are talking about. If your neighbour's ap appears at your house, at 5Ghz, means that either you are very close or his house if basically transparent to 5Ghz (lots of windows maybe?).

There is no such limited channel selection in 5Ghz. In 2.4 sure, but 5ghz surely not, with over a hundred channels and poor material penetration.

Meshed 5Ghz is neighbour friendly, not the other way around. Is a saner way of doing wireless network in crowded environments.

Some equipaments even use proprietary protocols and licensed radiobands for the trunk traffic, thus alleviating even more the 5Ghz range.

> but 5ghz surely not, with over a hundred channels

On which planet do you reside in which this is remotely true?

Many devices (clients and APs alike) do not properly implement DFS. Which leaves the number of usable channels around a dozen or so. And that's in 20 MHz mode. In his quest for more speed, my neighbor runs his network in 40 MHz or 80 MHz mode (can't remember which) which cuts the amount of usable channels in half / quarters. So the rest of the neighborhood deals with interference while he binges 4K Netflix with his Y-fronts around his ankles on the toilet.

I really hope this is sarcasm. Are you really suggesting an AP in every room? An AP and a router are not the same thing, and neither will give you a very very low latency 1.5 GB wireless connection in my experience.

What's wrong with one AP per room? That's exactly how it should be and indeed gives you bulletproof performance & reliability. Wi-Fi should be your home's "last mile" and everything before that should be wired.

The over-gigabit speeds are hyperbole, but in my case I'm regularly seeing ~500Mbps both ways and very consistent latency with no sudden spikes.

Most wireless problems are due to there being a single AP that's barely within reach causing tons of retransmissions which makes any real-time application (such as calls) unusable. It doesn't help that Wi-Fi signal strength meters are completely useless (maybe they should measure actual packet loss instead of RSSI which is only part of the picture) so end-users are unable to tell what's actually going on.

Having APs always within line of sight of the client device solves all these problems.

> The over-gigabit speeds are hyperbole

Certainly not. At home right now I'm getting 566Mbs, but my personal router is 2x2. At work, I get consistently 1.2gigabit on imac.

Hmm, I’m seeing 500Mbps with my mesh network straight through 2 floors and a bunch of walls (everything is connected through cable to the meshed routers).

Speed is not the only factor. In fact, most people thought their Wi-Fi was fine because for non-real-time usages, TCP will conceal occasional dropouts. Your in-browser test might be showing 500Mbps while what's really happening is +500Mbps in between bursts of nothing. Applications such as iperf3 would be able to tell you more (as they can report in much quicker intervals, allowing you to see spikes that would be averaged out) but a quick test is to just ping your gateway and move around in any area you will potentially use your device (even your orientation matters; if your body is blocking the line of the signal it could have a disastrous effect on an already-weak connection) and see if you notice any spikes. If not: congrats, if yes: you have shit Wi-Fi that TCP has been successfully concealing but the illusion will break down when you use a real-time application where retransmissions can't work (because they would be too late).

Ah, the good part is probably that the connected machines are not going to move very much, nor is the AP (e.g. the connections between the AP and machines are all cables). I simply don’t have a cable pulled from the top floor (where my fiber enters the house) to the bottom floor where my office is.

I’ve played realtime games over it, and haven’t had too much issues, so I guess it’s working well enough for my use case.

It’s possible the actual speed is higher though, and the occasional bursts of nothing are still there (the link to my home is 2Gbit).

> An AP and a router are not the same thing

They certainly aren't, but most routers can run in AP mode and cost way less than a dedicated AP. One AP per room is pretty overkill, if you do that, you definitely want to turn the transmit power down to help clients roam.

yeah. one wifi router (or ap if you want) per room (or on per two rooms). In a mesh network. Interconnected via wireless (not regular wifi).

this is the way.

Or you can plug a cable in your notebook and be happy.

> You can get a 1.5gigabit/sec connection between your laptop and the router, with very very low latency and super reliability.

Would you mind sharing what equipment you use?

While I now have wired connectivity to my access points, I have friends who don't have that option and would greatly benefit from better wifi. I would love to help them.

I doubt there is any router on the market today that operates on 2.4 Ghz by default. Some don't even have it as an option. So everyone with a Wi-Fi network in their house is already using the 5 Ghz band. And while range is a problem (in a lot of cases it isn't, considering modern city apartments are tiny and walls are made of cardboard), having multiple access points doesn't really fix it unless you have them scattered literally every few meters in your house. Heck I'm pretty sure I won't get a 1.5 Gbit/sec connection even if I put my router on the same table as my laptop.

I have an AP in pretty much every room on 5 GHz with low transmit power. I like it a lot - good speeds, not a lot of interference from the other APs, and clients mostly roam nicely as only the nearest AP is strong enough.

There's routers on the market today that are 2.4ghz only. I've got quite a number of them. They are cheap and since we've got few neighbors, 2.4 is pretty much wide open.

Yeah no. I have WiFi in my home in a grudging concession to others in the family. I hate all wireless tech. It's flakey and annoying. I've never had a wireless keyboard, mouse, or headphones that were reliable either. If they weren't dropping the connection, the battery was dying.