Four years ago, I was having slowdown issues (will go into this later) with my 6th gen AirPort Extreme sometimes. Normally I would troubleshoot issues like this, but with the AirPort Extreme being a little old and after seeing a bunch of articles and videos on mesh systems, I decided to get a highly rated, but expensive tri-band mesh system from Linksys, it came with 3 nodes.
There were a few things I was looking forward to with the mesh system, but mainly:
Auto-switching to the faster bands
Expanding the distance of wifi
The seamless roaming that they all advertised.
Where I parked my car in my old house, the AirPort Extreme wouldn't reach that far, and when I got in my cars every morning for work, I would have to deal with slow cell service, so the idea of moving a mesh system node close to that side of my house, along with the seamless roaming, really interest me.
Getting the system set up was really easy, but I was surprised with the lack of available settings. The AirPort had a lot more, but the Linksys hardly had any.
After setting it up, I was quickly starting to realize that mesh systems were not as great as I was hoping for. The speeds were the same, and sometimes worse with the brand new mesh system. I first thought, well, as long as they are good enough, the expanded range and roaming would make up for it..... But, it didn't work out that way.
Roaming just didn't work. I would be sitting in my car connected to the network, but it would be connected to the furthest node, which was in my master bedroom. It was worse than the slow speeds of cellular, mostly just nothing. But, it wouldn't automatically connect to any of the two closer nodes.
Then came the real problem, slowdown issues. They were suspiciously similar to the AirPort Extreme, but seemed even worse on the mesh system. I was able to figure out that the 5Ghz band was solid. It was fast and had decent signal strength. But, the 2.4Ghz band was sometimes slowing down, and sometimes to a crawl.
Even with this happening I wondered why it wasn't auto-switching to the faster 5Ghz band. I made sure it wasn't a distance issue, testing devices from different distances getting closer every time, but it would still stay on the much slower 2.4Ghz band.
I thought that maybe I got a bad node, so I called customer support. They very were helpful, helping me test every node, troubleshooting, as well as showing that there were advanced setting options, but I had to do a factory reset and set up the nodes again to use the advanced settings (lame). I was on the phone with them for literal hours.
I was disappointed with their solution to the roaming issue. They said when I am in my car and find that the iPhone is still connected to the furthest node to turn off the wifi on the iPhone and turn it back on. It worked, but I was pretty disappointed as this was not what I thought of when I kept hearing about seamless roaming.
The main issue with the slowdowns, they help me troubleshoot, and determined that the 2.4Ghz band was saturated, and every time a device connected to it I would experience the occasional slowdowns. This was also why the AirPort Extreme was having issues as well.
Their solution was split the 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz band, name they two different things and to keep most devices on the 5Ghz band and the few devices that were not compatible, use the 2.4Ghz band.
It worked, but why spend $400 on a new mesh system that I had to split the bands to work, and didn't really have seamless roaming, when my AirPort Extreme worked better in every way with the exception of the range.
This was all at the beginning of the pandemic (bought the mesh system a few weeks before the lockdowns), and I was worried that I wouldn't be able to return the mesh system, but Best Buy started to allow returns, and I returned it for a full refund.
I ended up splitting the bands on my AirPort Extreme, and the slowdown issues went away. The speeds were great, and I bought a second 6th gen AirPort Extreme on eBay, and wired it close to the side of the house that I parked on any it worked a lot better in every way than the super expensive mesh system.
I have since bought a different home, much bigger, and now have a total of seven 6th gen AirPort Extremes, creating a pseudo-mesh network, and it works great.
The iPad Pro 11& iPhone 13 mini & Apple TVs are getting 300 mpbs over wifi? that’s extraordinary.
All my ATVs with tvOS, even my now super old 2015 Apple TV 4 (HD) can get over 300Mbps on the AirPort Extreme wifi.
Actually, this was one of the things I tested when comparing the expensive mesh system to the old AirPort Extreme, and two floors away, the ATV4 consistently was faster with the AirPort Extreme than the Linksys Tri-band Mesh System with one of the Linksys nodes in the same room as the ATV4.
